Essay: Social Innovation And Community Engagement - Developing A Cleaning Service For Refugees In Brisbane.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit, you should be able to:

LO1 demonstrate an understanding of the importance, policies and strategies for building safe and supportive environments for working with children, young people and vulnerable adults (GA1, GA5).

LO2 discuss the principles and focus of community engagement as they relate to the relationship between business and marginalised or disadvantaged communities (GA1, GA2)

LO3 evaluate the ethical and social responsibility of participants in business and community organisations (GA4, GA8);

LO4 evaluate strategies related to work readiness drawn from volunteer experience and associated personal and professional skill development (GA4, GA5, GA9);

LO5 demonstrate professional behaviour and attitudes (GA2, GA5); and

LO6 critically reflect upon the impact of the community engagement experience on their values, assumptions and attitudes (GA2, GA4, GA9);

Description of your proposed social innovation

As per Moulaert (2013), the term social innovation refers to new strategies, concepts and ideas along with organization which intend to fulfill social requirement. The new ideas or strategies in the name of innovation are developed in an attempt to strengthen the civic society. The theory of social innovations includes several aspects like open source methods and techniques through which are well-known as social process of innovation. Cajaiba-Santana (2014) suggests that the main aim of social innovation refers to the innovations which have some social purpose to fulfill such as community development. The innovators of social innovations include the names of Muhammad Yunus who founded Grammeen Bank pioneering the notion of microcredit so that support can be provided to the innovators in more than one developing country like Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Moulaert, MacCallumc and Hillier 2013). Since social innovation fulfills social purpose there remains confusion between social innovation and social work. Hence, it needs to be clarified what distinguishes social innovations from social work. Unlike social work which refers to some activities that aim to the betterment of society, social innovation emphasizes on the process of innovation as to how the innovations or change happen. According to Grimm et al. (2013), the term also alludes to the new idea or new way of corporation which work towards achieving of sustainable society. The whole idea of social innovation is generally diffused through particular organization. Even though the concept is diffused by organizations, the aim of social innovation does not focus on generating profiting.

Meanwhile, Phillips et al. (2015) states that as per the Bureau of European Policy Advisors, the concept of social innovation is socially oriented. Hence, social innovation alludes to the ability of addressing the social requirements which could not be fulfilled by the traditional policies. However, there are two other characterizations of social innovations. A range of social innovations aim to improve a group of individuals and the other characterization of social innovation focuses on the willingness to change social relations. Often social innovations are considered as the way of increasing the quality of service that are offered with a social purpose, Moreover, social innovations are the result of mental creativity which has a purpose of meeting the social need.

On the other hand, as per O'Mara-Eves et al.(2013), the theory of community management has been interpreted by several ways. However, the most considered theory of community engagement alludes to involvement, participation along with a range of activities. It is mainly the process of a collaborative work while engaging community groups in order to address the issues which have an influence on the well being of a group of individuals or a community. The concept of community management is to harness involvement from communities in the process of improvement. Hence, community development alludes to the participation of the people of community in collective activities. The whole idea of community engagement is to benefit the society as well as the concerned organization (Wells et al. 2013). Thus, it can be said that social innovation and community engagement are interconnected society is the most common factor of the two concept as well as both the two concepts generate benefits to the society.

Discussion of the financial, environmental and ethical implications of your social innovation and how your social innovation contributes to the common good

The new idea will be developing a cleaning service in Brisbane manned by the refugees who come from Syria and Iraq. The cleaning service will be aiming to create employment opportunities for the refugees since they are underprivileged and belong from a vulnerable background. The cleaning service will be exclusively for the Iraq and Syrian refugees since they hardly get any job opportunities in the competitive labor market. There are a large number of issues for which the refugees from Iraq and Syria do not get opportunities of employment and one of them is that they belong from different cultural background in the Australian society while other barriers include not having local references, no opportunities of education and mainly no opportunities of employment. Hence, keeping the aim of improving this community in mind, the social innovation will be establishing the cleaning service organization (Balestrini et al. 2014).

Beside of giving the opportunity of employment, the refugees will be given training so that they will be able to enhance their efficiency as well as confidence. The refugees will be given on job training so that they will be to learn practical aspects and shape their skills accordingly. The major part of the social innovation will be the assurance that every refugee during their training as well as after the training will be providing support to them so that they do not end up in discontinuation of their employment (Dare, Schirmer and Vanclay 2014). Every employee will be given the electronic device through which they will be provided with support in case they face any issues or difficulties when they will be in the practical field.

The social innovation can be distinguished since there is another cleaning service organization in Brisbane which is run by the refugees from Africa. Thus this idea of developing cleaning service organization in order to give employment opportunities to new group refugees is a new idea (Waterton and Watson 2013). On the other hand providing the refugees the electronic gadgets through which they will not be able tracked but through which they can be provided assistance whenever needed fulfills the purpose of the social innovation.

Financial implications: The refugee cleaning service must have its source of finance in order to continue its operations. Since the aim of the cleaning service is to provide employment opportunities, it must fulfill the refugees’ financial needs (Moulaert 2013). Hence, in order to assure that the financial process remains undisrupted, the company must assure that the financial flow is from multiple sources. The cleaning service will not be relied only on the government grants. Instead, it will tie up with big companies who will be helping by financial means in order to promote their social responsibility activities. While the industrial entities will be providing financial support, the individual investors will also be welcomed in order to provide support economically to the cleaning service.

Environmental implications: The social innovation will give exclusive attention to the sustainable approach. The cleaning machines and other equipments used for the purpose of cleaning will be used by the refugees will made of elements that are easily degradable (Moulaert 2013). For example, instead of modern plastic made brooms, the traditional wooden brooms will be used during the process of cleaning. The products with eco-friendly components will include cleaning liquid cleaner which does not contain any chemical.

Ethical implications: The ethical implications will be taken under consideration while in the whole design of social innovation. Even though the aim of the social innovation is to upgrade the societal well being of refugees, special attention will be given so that asylum seekers are not included among the refugees from Iraq and Syria. It will be assured no racism is developed between the people from Iraq and Syria. A healthy environment will be maintained assuring that not a single refugee is discriminated based on their cultural background and race (Dare, Schirmer and Vanclay, 2014). The volunteers who will be designated in order to provide support to the refugees for the professional purpose must be ensured that they provide support to each refugee without considering their cultural background.

Contribution to the common good: The main purpose of the social innovation will be providing assistance to the unprivileged people so that they will be able to rebuild their lives with maintaining dignity (Moulaert 2013). The social innovation will contribute to the society by creating sustainable employment for the under privilege people. On the other hand, one of the main agenda of the social innovation is to create a safe as well as healthy working environment where these refugees will not be discriminated, rather will be given the opportunity to enhance their skills.

The major challenge which might occur in the implementation process of social innovation is the racial discriminative behavior from the Australian community. The Australian people might have a negative outlook towards the refugees. The refugees might be underestimated and can face humiliation since they take shelter in a country which is not their own country (Waterton and Watson 2013). The other major challenge can be aroused in terms of language. Language can become a huge barrier since the people from Iraq and Syria hardly can communicate over English language while Australia is exclusively an english-speaking country. Hence, while delivering the cleaning service, there is a high chance that the refugees will be facing immense challenges while having conversation with the Australian customers (Dare, Schirmer and Vanclay 2014). However, the social innovation concept will give a special attention on language training so that the refugees will acquire basic knowledge of the English language in order to make the Australian people understand what they want to convey. Meanwhile, the employees will be given the training on etiquette of Australian culture in order to assure that they do not face humiliation while serving their employment.

Conclusion

Thus in order to conclude it will be apt to assert that social innovation concept will fulfill the purpose of social need since it aims to elevate the social status and wellbeing of the refugees from Iraq and Syria. With social purpose, the social innovation concept will be developing a Refugee Cleaning Service in Brisbane which will be owned, run as well as staffed by the refugees from Iran and Syria. The paper began by giving an overview of the theory of social innovation and community engagement as it was important to give an understanding of the two concepts.  The two concepts were well defined in that section while discussed how the two theories are dependable on each other. The major part of the study gave the overview of the proposed social innovation concept as well as it gave special attention on the financial, environmental and ethical implications of the proposed social innovation concept. The study then proceeded further discussing how the proposed concept generates contribution to the common good. In the final part of the discussion, the study also highlights the possible challenges in the implications of the social innovation concept.

References 

Balestrini, M., Bird, J., Marshall, P., Zaro, A. and Rogers, Y., 2014, April. Understanding sustained community engagement: a case study in heritage preservation in rural Argentina. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 2675-2684). ACM.

Cajaiba-Santana, G., 2014. Social innovation: Moving the field forward. A conceptual framework. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 82, pp.42-51.

Dare, M., Schirmer, J. and Vanclay, F., 2014. Community engagement and social licence to operate. Impact assessment and project appraisal, 32(3), pp.188-197.

Grimm, R., Fox, C., Baines, S. and Albertson, K., 2013. Social innovation, an answer to contemporary societal challenges? Locating the concept in theory and practice. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 26(4), pp.436-455.

Moulaert, F. ed., 2013. The international handbook on social innovation: collective action, social learning and transdisciplinary research. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Moulaert, F., MacCallum, D. and Hillier, J., 2013. Social innovation: intuition, precept, concept. The International Handbook on Social Innovation: collective action, social learning and transdisciplinary research, 13.

O'Mara-Eves, A., Brunton, G., McDaid, G., Oliver, S., Kavanagh, J., Jamal, F., Matosevic, T., Harden, A. and Thomas, J., 2013. Community engagement to reduce inequalities in health: a systematic review, meta-analysis and economic analysis. Public Health Research, 1(4).

Phillips, W., Lee, H., Ghobadian, A., O’Regan, N. and James, P., 2015. Social innovation and social entrepreneurship: A systematic review. Group & Organization Management, 40(3), pp.428-461.

Waterton, E. and Watson, S. eds., 2013. Heritage and community engagement: collaboration or contestation?. Routledge.

Wells, K.B., Jones, L., Chung, B., Dixon, E.L., Tang, L., Gilmore, J., Sherbourne, C., Ngo, V.K., Ong, M.K., Stockdale, S. and Ramos, E., 2013. Community-partnered cluster-randomized comparative effectiveness trial of community engagement and planning or resources for services to address depression disparities. Journal of general internal medicine, 28(10), pp.1268-1278.