Now What? Social Innovation Proposal

How’s it? I’ve just posted my business proposal for Now What?. Now What? is the Social Innovation I’ve developed from this whole experience.Now What? is an internet based portal to link recent school leavers, with community organisations in need of volunteers.
Now What? is aimed at the young adult market of 18-26yrs. It will cater directly to people within this age group who are looking to gain valuable life experience from volunteering within Australia.

The proposal can be found here….

Lattitude Australia- Social Innovation Case Study

As part of this my Social Innovation subject, I chose a Melbourne based SI to do a case study on. I chose Lattitude Australia. I interviewed Angela and Ben from Lattitude’s marketing team to find out more about the organisation. I’ve finally edited it down, and got it up onto the wide world web, out there for everyone, including you, to see…

Check it out here….

The rising cost of healthy foods

From ABC News Online

The rising cost of healthy foods

By Cate Burns

For Australia’s most vulnerable, the cost of healthy foods remains out of their reach. (Getty Images: Ian Waldie)

On Friday the Preventative Health Taskforce released a major discussion paper putting forward strategies to prevent and reverse the rise in overweight and obesity.

Obesity and other diet-related diseases such as heart disease and dental caries account for a large percentage of the health cost in Australia and are hitting those with the least financial and social resources the hardest. These preventable diseases will continue to plague our most vulnerable while the cost of healthy foods remains out of their reach.

Why do poor people eat poorly? Inevitably the answer has been “because they do not know any better”. This supposed ignorance has been the justification for the last 20 to 30 years of nutrition education. Health authorities have used dietary guidelines and exhortations to teach people about how to eat a healthy diet.

However, while consumers do need to have nutrition knowledge and food skills, and indeed many young Australians may not have either, knowledge is not the only ingredient for a healthy diet. The cost and taste of food are the strongest determinant of food purchase. As people’s income drops, cost becomes the primary driver of what they put in their trolleys. “Getting the most food for the least cost” becomes the modus operandi in the supermarket.

Read More….

Local Food Growing

From ABC News Online

Farmers’ markets drawing the crowds

By Amanda Collins

Farmers’ markets have been trading in Australia for almost 10 years, but now more than ever, consumers are headed to market for fresh local produce.

Australian Farmers’ Markets Association chairperson Jane Adams says there are about 120 markets operating regularly throughout the country, with more expected to be trading by the end of the year.

Situated on the southern downs in Queensland, Stanthorpe is the latest community to launch a farmers market.

Reliant on agriculture, the region produces a diverse range of fruit and vegetables and almost all of Queensland’s apple and pear crop. Read more….

Despite this, Stanthorpe resident Gwen Jones says local produce is difficult to find and a regular farmers’ market is long overdue.

“We pass the farms but we just can’t seem to buy the local produce in the supermarkets. So it is really good to be able to come here and get fresh local produce,” she said.

Ms Adams, who also works with communities to establish markets said: “The growth of farmers’ markets has really come from two ends, one is the consumer and the other is the producer.”

Stanthorpe organic fruit and vegetable grower, Ray Palmer agrees farmers’ markets are becoming more popular for a couple of reasons.

“Producers can get retail prices and consumers can ask questions,” he said.

“There are also people who are wanting to reduce the amount of miles the food travels before it gets to their plate.”

*This Wednesday!* Swanston St Bike Memorial

Social Innovation Camp

Here’s a group from England who are on similar wave lengths to my studies class. They run Social Innovation Camps linking people with ideas with people with skills to bring them into being. It’s all internet based innovations. In their words,

‘Through unusual, creative events we bring together talented software developers and designers with social innovators to build effective web-based solutions to real social problems.’

The long and short of this is that they are asking for ideas to be submitted. Either to come along and be involved in the development(bit hard when its over in the UK) or allow others to take the ideas as inspiration to develop a project of their own. There’s a few projects from our studies class that could be possible for this forum. If your keen check out the site here for details.

Is Showing Telling? IP for Product Designers

This coming Wednesday Design Victoria is putting on a forum which will explore the intellectual property issues that face furniture and product designers, while establishing and protecting creative ideas.

It’d be an interesting night to check I rekon, I can’t unfortunately, Wednesday night is trivia night. But if your keen here’s the details:

Wednesday 8 October 2008

6pm-9pm

Melbourne Museum, Nicholson st, Carlton

Del.icio.us Added

Well I’m finding out more and more about this blogging business. I’ve created a del.icio.us account on the advice of Soumitri, and also added a link to it on the side. Seems relatively easy to get your head around.

Pretty much the guist of it is instead of having folders to categorise your links you attach tags to them, and then various piles appear depending what you tags you select. So the same link could appear for a number of categories. Makes sense really…

Social Innovation Camp

This site I just came across gives a clear outline of what social innovation is and how it can be combined with technologies. They are an English based organisation, trying to ‘bring together talented software developers and designers with social innovators to build effective web-based solutions to real social problems.’

Check it out

Business Proposal

Tomorrow is our first class with RMIT business professor Peter Sheldrake. He is going to help us craft our social innovation concepts, into a real world business proposal. Something we could go to the bank with, literally! We had a brief run through last week, of where everyone’s ideas are at so far, and there’s some interesting ones in there.

My concept for a social innovation has been crafted into the following:

‘Now What?’ will be an internet based portal for recent school leavers. My inspiration comes from the existing Lattitude program (formally GAP) that offers school leavers the opportunity of volunteering overseas in various areas from caring, teaching, and environmental work. I went to Poland with GAP and taught English there in Warsaw. This was an amazing experience, especially being fresh out of school. I think I gained a lot from the experience, and personally was a much better choice then diving straight into uni.

‘Now What?’ will however target school leavers, who are looking to do something within Australia. They’ll probably have aspirations of further education, but have had enough for now, and want a year off to experience something else. ‘Now What?’ will be an agent between interested young people and community groups, NGO’s, conservation groups, who are interested in keen, engaged volunteers. ‘Now What?’ will work to establish a network of organisations that have at their core, an ethos of improving and assisting the community and area around them. This could be organisations such as Meals on Wheels, Green Corps, The Flying Doctors Service to name a few. It could also be roles such as assisting in research trips, conservation efforts and such. Applicants could either try out a field that they are interested in pursuing as an educational direction, or try something completely different to what they think they could end up doing.This opportunity would give them amazing life experience as well as a possibly valuable, relevant experience into their chosen field of further education.

The applicant could elect to either work within their own community, or apply to work somewhere else within Australia. This would be ‘Now What?’s main role, and allow young people the opportunity to travel Australia and gain a better understanding of the different environments that make up this massive country.

The money side of things I still need to develop, I don’t think a membership fee is viable, but possibly an introduction fee of some sort, or sponsorship from groups, schools, government?