Social Innovation Canada

What is Social Innovation Canada?

Social Innovation Canada is building a robust, connected ecosystem for social innovation practitioners in Canada. It weaves together existing assets and builds collaborative infrastructure to enable people, organizations and systems to problem solve better. 

What Does Social Innovation Canada Do?

Social Innovation Canada advances this work through: 

  • Capacity building through open source SI Curriculum and Communities of Practice
  • Navigation, wayfinding and connection through a national mapping project, and regional online and offline community building
  • Data and storytelling that help social innovators demonstrate evidence of their impact
  • Aligning for action by connecting organizations and systems change projects to learn from each other and move forward, together

Learn more and sign up for the SI Canada newsletter at sicanada.org

RADIUS and Social Innovation canada

BC Regional Node

One of our goals at RADIUS is to contribute to an adaptive, thriving, local, regional and national ecosystem for social innovation and social entrepreneurship. To advance this goal, in 2018 RADIUS joined Social Innovation Canada as a founding regional node and partner in BC.

As a regional node RADIUS supports local innovators by weaving connections, convening for information sharing and practice building, and wayfinding in the sector. 

We currently convene two working groups: 

  • Social Ventures BC: For incubators, accelerators and key ecosystem enablers of BC’s social venture ecosystem. This group is closed to social venture intermediaries, but if this describes your work, please be in touch!
  • BC Changing Systems Group: A community of practice that shares and learns about accelerating systemic change, including through solutions labs and other methods and approaches. This group hosts meetups every two months. 

To learn more or sign up for our upcoming events, please contact community@radiussfu.com

Get Involved

Notably, our efforts so far have been focused on Metro Vancouver. However, in 2020 and beyond, we hope to build strong relationships with other nodes and networks throughout the province who can lead context and place-specific conversations in their own communities and regions, as well as local partnerships with grassroots leaders who haven’t traditionally been lifted up or seen by the social innovation community.


If you are an organization within BC focusing on social innovation or systems change capacity and ecosystem building, please get in touch to see how SI Canada could support your work.

Our Team

Shawn Smith

Executive Director

Shawn is the co-founder and Executive Director of RADIUS, an Adjunct Professor at the Beedie School of Business, and Director of Social Innovation for Simon Fraser University. Having spent the last 15 years working with, in, and on social impact organizations on three continents, he is also a founder of IMPAQTO (Ecuador), Global Agents for Change and Education Generation. Shawn also co-led the ALT/Now Economic Inequality systems change program at the Banff Centre and speaks and regularly consults on social innovation and entrepreneurship.

Shawn is a top-rated educator, Business in Vancouver top 40 under 40 recipient, and completed his MBA at the University of Oxford in 2010 as a Skoll Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship.