Domain 11: Accessible Community Service and Social Enterprise
58 Accessibility and Social Innovation
Despite this social deficit, there are many exciting local innovations or developments led by or serving people with disabilities, with an increasing number focusing on social research and development (social R&D). Future of Good CEO Vinod Rajasekaran defines social R&D as “a combination of competency, culture, and craft that is intentionally applied to continuously learn, evaluate, refine and conduct practical experiments in order to enhance social well-being.”[1] Organizations like the Skills Society in Edmonton, through a participatory social R&D approach, have measurably helped improve access to participating in civic life, community involvement, employment and entrepreneurship outcomes.[2] Despite such examples, one study found that only 5% of social impact organizations (excluding health care, where there is already sophisticated R&D) engage in any meaningful amount of R&D.
Maayan Ziv, a Toronto student living with disability, developed an app that enables people with disabilities to crowdsource information about access to public buildings. She speaks about applying social innovation thinking to a social justice problem traditionally approached on campus only through advocacy, which can be a long struggle with only incremental rewards:
“There have been barriers for centuries,” she says. “There has been a certain kind of repetitive approach to how we . . . solve these problems, but [there is something] in the nature of creating a conversation and just literally doing it. There is a lot you can do without fighting… Accessibility is traditionally associated with an institutional tone and we want to move away from this. [It] can be sexy, and it can be fun, it needs to be fun, and if it isn’t then we won’t see the engagement that we need to see. With a different tone we are able to inspire people to be a part of what we’ve started.” [3]
SPOTLIGHT: Curiko: Access to Experience
Curiko (formerly Kudoz) is a Vancouver-based learning exchange for adults with cognitive disabilities. It is a platform “connecting people with and without disabilities to splendid things to do, together.”[4] Youth and adults with cognitive disabilities search the free platform and book one-hour experiences to try, anything from learning how to podcast to learning a few words and phrases in a new language. Curiko arose out of a social R&D looking at the experience of social isolation among adults living with cognitive disabilities led by the social enterprise consultancy InWithForward, working with the Burnaby Association for Community Living, posAbilities, and Simon Fraser Society for Community Living.[5] Among the many findings in their deep many-months-long ethnographic inquiry process, directly engaging with people with developmental disabilities, they gleaned insights like this: “The diagnosis of ‘developmental disability’ separated them from others. The words they had to describe themselves matched the words doctors and services used to talk about them. With no alternative story about who they were and who they could become, ‘care’ ‘safety’ and ‘protection’ became the organizing principles of their lives, structuring their interactions and narrowing what they considered possible.”[6] Having hosted hundreds of grassroots events, Curiko is helping to create a more inclusive, stronger community.
- Rajasekaran, Vinod. Getting to Moonshot: Inspiring R&D Practices in Canada’s Social Sector. SiG. 2017. The term “social R&D” was first coined by sociologist and social worker Jack Rothman. (1974). Planning and Organizing for Social Change: Action Principles from Social Science Research. Columbia University Press. Rothman and their team of researchers, disturbed by the lack of knowledge transfer from research to practice, undertook a review of 30 academic journals, dissertations and other works, totalling nearly 1,000 pieces of original research. They then distilled them down to 16 “action guides” for community practice. ↵
- Vinod Rajasekaran. (2017, October 16). Want to Drive Inclusive Growth in Canada? Strengthen the Social Sector’s R&D Prowess. The Philanthropist. https://thephilanthropist.ca/2017/10/want-to-drive-inclusive-growth-in-canada-strengthen-the-social-sectors-rd-prowess/ ↵
- Rideau Hall Foundation. (2015, July 28). My Giving Moment. https://vimeo.com/134746433 ↵
- InWithForward. Example: Kudoz [website]. https://www.inwithforward.com/examples/kudoz/ ↵
- InWithForward, Example: Kudoz. ↵
- Curiko. https://www.curiko.ca/ ↵
