Laurier hosts first annual Changemaker Innovation Challenge
Changemaker Innovation Challenge
At the start of April Laurier held its inaugural Changemaker Innovation Challenge (CIC), run by the Schlegel Centre for Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation. CIC is the university’s local qualifier competition for the global Map the System Challenge, run by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford. The competition is a global research-based competition in which students explore a social or environmental challenge they are passionate about in order to truly understand the system underlying the problem before jumping in to tackle it. The kick off for the challenge was in January during Laurier's Changemaker Awareness Month. After the kickoff, students got busy researching their chosen issue and attending workshops put on by the Schlegel Centre in areas such as system mapping and impact gap analysis.
According to Laura Allan, Executive Director of Schlegel Centre for Entrepreneurship & Social Innovation “We do a great job at Laurier when it comes to solution focused competitions, but it’s not often that we sit down and look at the problems in our world more in-depth to understand the causes and implications. It’s great to see the students really working on issues they care deeply about.”
Another unique aspect of the CIC was the importance that was placed on interdisciplinary cooperation. It was required that teams be comprised of at least one member from a different program or faculty. The purpose of this restriction was to ensure students had diverse views and opinions on their team when looking at their chosen issue.
ASHOKA
The Changemaker Innovation Challenge was started to celebrate Laurier’s AshokaU Changemaker Campus designation and engage students in changemaking. In 2016 Laurier became only the second Canadian university to receive this prestigious designation, for being a leading university in supporting students in their efforts to become local and global Changemakers. January’s Changemaker Awareness Month helped kick off the challenge and spread awareness of the designation and changemaking in general.
Around the globe, there are 42 Ashoka U Changemaker campuses, many of which compete in the Map the System challenge. Out of all the 33 universities around the world who submitted teams to the challenge, Laurier boasted over 10% of the global registrations with 130 teams registered, which is a great accomplishment in light of this being Laurier’s first year participating.
Our teams
The teams that competed researched a breadth of issues from water pollution to Islamophobia. The submissions were narrowed down to 30 semi-finalist teams. These semi-finalists presented to panels of judges on April 4th and five finalist teams were chosen. The finalists focused on diverse issues: income inequality in the GTA, Yangtze River pollution, sexual violence in varsity athletics, poverty in Niger, and autism in the workplace.
For the finals Laurier welcomed three guest judges to decide who would be moving on to the national Map the System competition: Nicole Almond, President of Enactus Canada, and Laurier alum, Tracey Robertson, the Strategic Lead for Innovation at the Ontario Trillium Foundation, and Victoria Abboud, National Director of Changemaker Education at Ashoka Canada. After a tough deliberation, the judges chose to put forward the group of Jordan Kang, Asad Ali, and Daniel Austin, who focused on the difficulties that people with autism face in the workforce.
"We are super excited to present at a national level, and we are going to do our absolute best to bring awareness of this issue to a larger audience." Said the team after the competition.
Nationals
The team will now go on to compete at the Map the System national competition in Toronto on May 3rd. At the national competition students will compete for one of two spots at the global Map the System competition in Oxford England on June 7th. The top two national teams will win a paid trip to Oxford, England to compete and represent Canada on the global stage. One of last year’s national winners, a team from Mount Royal University, went on to win the global finals with an in-depth look at the opioid crisis in Canada. The other team that moved on from Canada last year, from Simon Fraser University, secured a third place finish with a project looking at mental health in second generation Canadians.
The Schlegel Centre plans to make the Changemaker Innovation Challenge an annual event at Laurier. Stay tuned to the Schlegel Centre social channels to hear about how this year’s winners do at the Map the System national competition, and to find out details about next year’s challenge.