Connecting Four

Launching our Strategic Plan

Connect Four was born from our Strategic Plan, which marked a step change for us going forward and focussed our aims on maximising social impact through developing, delivering and enabling social innovation. The strategy reinforces the goals of our projects and services, outlining our vision, values, mission and method, showing the foundation of all our work to be social innovation.

As well as outlining what we do, this living document also represents our promise to drive social innovation and collaboration through a number of tools and networks. It was only fitting that launching the Strategic Plan would represent the first of many ways in which to do this. From here we began to plan Connect Four.

Connecting sectors

One of People Know How’s key strategic enablers is ‘Partnership’. Stemming from our method of sharing our learning, working in partnership is key to how we achieve our goals. It’s also integral to social innovation, which we explored in a recent research briefing entitled Social Innovation & People Know How, published in the run up to Connect Four. This briefing outlines research on social innovation and what it means to us as a charity.

One key finding is that systems can sometimes have an unintended effect of stifling a community’s wellbeing. We identified one potential way of reducing these effects as collaborating across sectors, creating communication among groups that may not usually interact. This led us to title our event Connect Four, and to combine the launch of our Strategic Plan with the launch of a social innovation network through an evening of speakers and facilitated discussion.

The event

On Monday 18 November we opened the doors of 525 Ferry Road to over 80 guests from the academic, public, third and business sectors in Scotland.

We were joined by keynote speaker Louise Pulford, the executive director of the Social Innovation Exchange, who kicked off the proceedings by speaking about social innovation, how we can make change happen.

We were also joined by speakers representing each sector: Anna Fowlie, Chief Executive of SCVO; Dr Hock Tan, Lecturer in International Business at Edinburgh Napier University; Martin Ewart, CEO of Taranata Group; and Judith Proctor, Chief Officer of Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership.

These inspiring talks were followed by table discussions. Each table was assigned a topic, curated by our Chief Executive to match the interests and experience of our guests. Themes ranged from loneliness and isolation, children and young people, community support and expectations of a Social Innovation Network. With a People Know How note-taker assigned to each table, we made sure to record the conversation to later draw actions from the discussion.

Following up

Though the event may be over, Connect Four marked the beginning of a Social Innovation Network that will continue to grow. Starting with following up the actions recorded in our table discussions, we have already begun to construct a section of our website dedicated to social innovation resources.

We began collecting these resources in the lead up to Connect Four, supplementing them with our research briefing, as well as the findings from our lead up social media campaign which recorded what our followers think about the possibilities for change and social innovation within their communities.

We aim to continually share these resources, maintain the network and grow our capabilities for social innovation even further.