Brown University was recently recognized by Ashoka U as one of 22 Changemaker Campuses for being a “leading institution in social innovation education.” But what is social innovation, and how is it relevant to us as students? Social innovation is the pursuit of transformative, innovative and sustainable solutions to the world’s problems. While this is a good definition, it doesn’t fully explain what social innovation means to me. To do that, I need to explain my experiences with social innovation and how the concept has influenced my life and my work. From the moment I heard of the term “social innovation,” I was obsessed with joining the “club” of social innovators, who in my mind were people who spoke at TED Talks, appeared on CNN, got awards and were named as Ashoka or Echoing Green Fellows for their work. I soon had my opportunity.
During my first year at Brown, I co-founded the Food Recovery Network, which works with students on college campuses to recover food from their dining halls and donate it to people in need. The organization grew quickly, expanding to 50 colleges within two years. Soon we were receiving recognition for our work, from a Starr Fellowship to large foundation grants to interviews with news stations. We never got the coveted CNN, but MSNBC wasn’t too far from it.
I was riding high at that point — I had done it. I had helped create an organization that recognized the interconnected problems of food waste and food insecurity and initiated a solution that had the potential to both end hunger in America and help reduce the effect of global warming caused by the tens of billions of pounds of wasted food that we send to landfills every year. We were harnessing the power of college students and taking advantage of a tax credit that encouraged businesses to donate food.
Everything we did fit right into the definition of social innovation. We created transformative, innovative and sustainable change. In my mind, I was a social innovator. I think I half-expected a club membership card to come in the mail, with the title “Ben Chesler: Social Innovator for Life.” After a year of hard work, I handed over the operations of FRN to a team of paid staff and returned to my “normal” life of hiking, theater and college classes, with the confidence of someone who had accomplished his goals in life.
I was signed up for my first conference on social innovation, the Nexus: Global Youth Summit, excited to talk about my past work and receive congratulations for my accomplishments. What I experienced instead surprised me and helped clarify what social innovation really is. Every time I would tell people about FRN, they would say something along the lines of, “That’s awesome. So what project are you working on now?” What project am I working on now? I already solved the world’s problems, why would I need to do anything else?
Here’s why: We live in a world that is constantly changing, increasingly complex and interconnected. Problems are no longer confined to a small group of people — they are the result of many interrelated factors. A famine in a small province in China has implications for people across the world, from foreign tourists to American companies that import toys from factories in that province. And by the time we have “solved” the problem of the famine — through a government subsidy of food, for example — new challenges will arise. Even the solutions themselves create a whole range of problems which will need to be solved. The world never stops, and as a result the problems caused by the normal functioning of the world never stop.
That’s where social innovators come in. Social innovation is not a side project that is separate from the rest of your life. It is a way of thinking about the world that values human rights, and it is expressed through actions that solve social problems. Every discipline has a way of viewing the world: Economists put a monetary value on everything, and sociologists look at the interactions between people and groups of people to explain how the world works. Social innovators look at the world as a set of problems, and they focus on solutions to those problems, drawing on methodology and ideas from different disciplines to do so.
To do that, we need people who will stop at nothing to solve the social problems of our era — people who are not discouraged by the complexities of the challenges we face, but rather empowered by the chance to create lasting change. We need people who understand that the results we are seeking will be realized in a matter of lifetimes, not months or even years. We need people who recognize social problems in all aspects of their lives and constantly think of solutions. It is tiring, it is emotionally draining and it is exhilarating. But above all, it is rewarding.
Ben Chesler ’15 would love to know what social innovation means to you. He can be reached at benjamin_chesler@brown.edu or @BenjaminChesler, but he will judge you if you send him a tweet.
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