The Social Innovation Lab is an initiative of the Give Where You Live Foundation, designed to address the most difficult social and economic challenges facing our community.
Through the Social Innovation Lab, we are looking to shift the conditions that hold complex challenges in place across our region. By bringing together people with different ideas and perspectives to collaborate, experiment and learn, we aim to uncover new insights, design and test place-based solutions with the potential to create meaningful social and economic change.
Over the past 8 weeks, the Give Where You Live Foundation Social Innovation Lab has brought together an extraordinary group of thinkers, practitioners, and people with lived experience to tackle one of our region’s most complex challenges: homelessness.
Together, through the Homelessness Innovation Challenge, we’ve done something powerful.
We’ve built real innovation capability.
We’ve strengthened collaboration across sectors.
And we’ve generated 9 bold, human-centred concepts to test and learn our way toward better outcomes.
From early identification and prevention through to crisis response, these concepts reimagine how we:
- Spot the early signals of housing stress
- Coordinate support before crisis escalates
- Provide safe, trusted pathways when people need it most
These concepts represent a shift from reacting to homelessness to preventing it at its source.
To the Design and Innovation Circle participants — thank you.
Thank you for bringing your expertise, your lived experience, your curiosity, and your willingness to think differently. Thank you for helping to build a platform for ongoing innovation in our community, not simply a set of ideas.
What happens next?
The next stage is where ideas begin to turn into evidence, action, and impact. The concepts will go to the Foundation’s leadership team and from there, we will determine which initiatives and their experiments will be supported through this year’s Innovation Fund.
And the most exciting part? We’re just getting started.
We can’t wait to share more about the next Social Innovation Lab challenge later this year.
Because if we’re serious about change, together we need to keep building the capability, the partnerships, and the courage to try new approaches.