Dr. Sheila Cannon

The technical expertise and scientific knowledge already exist to mitigate the climate crisis. The barrier to an effective response has been socio-cultural beliefs, values and assumptions that legitimise how we organise. Climate crisis response focuses on national and international climate policies, business practices, technological solutions, and individual behaviour. Meanwhile, social purpose organising, including research and practice of nonprofit, nongovernmental, and civil society organisations, has been surprisingly fragmented, diluting the global civil society efforts to legitimise sustainable ways of organising, such as regenerative food systems, sustainable agriculture, green urban planning, circular economies, and transitioning to renewable energy. VOLSOCA will synthesise the different approaches to organising with social and environmental purposes, including civil society, third sector, social enterprise, and sustainable development studies, to deliver new theory and frameworks on value-oriented organising (VOO), a new concept that I have developed to test and refine in this project. VOO is the process of creating, capturing and sharing social, environmental and economic value, a trivalent nested model. Great efforts by many third sector organisations have developed new ways to create sustainable value, but they have not scaled. VOLSOCA will kick start the scaling up of civil society sustainability initiatives by delivering a new framework for the value they create, but also how they actually influence, or legitimise, what is valued. This project opens up new horizons to address the challenge of legitimising climate adaptation, the social changes that underpin successful change required to reduce the negative impact of human activity on the natural environment as well as adapt to climate change. With my multidisciplinary team, I will use key case studies and action research to create a new theoretical framework to illustrate how the process of organising to create value influences or legitimises what is valued, and thus influences social change. This will lead to new areas of research in the socio-environmental sciences and a fundamentally new understanding of climate adaptation.

Sharing knowledge and resources on teaching and studying social enterprise and social innovation. We wrote a case book of social enterprises. We created a National Mapping project for Viet Nam, and a plan for one in Ireland.

A case study of one historic, community-owned social enterprise provides insight into how organisations create different types of value for different stakeholders. This project consists of conducting qualitative data and includes empirical work by one doctoral researcher. Firstly a comprehensive literature review was conducted, followed by data gathering at the lighthouse and with wider stakeholders. The data and findings will be written up and submitted as conference and journal articles.

Across Canada and in many other countries, a 'new wave' of civic engagement is emerging (Molenveld, et al., in press; Edelenbos et al., 2018; Voorberg et al., 2014) in which communities, whether geographic or social, are working together to create major social change and provide services in different ways. This research project integrates several genres of literature to better understand how citizen initiatives succeed in social change and community building. It focuses on Ireland where major social change has occurred in recent years, notably related to women's reproductive rights and attitudes toward homosexuality. Situated at the Centre for Social Innovation, Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, the project will also contribute to ongoing collaborative linkages of the Centre with the Masters program in Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership (MPNL) at Carleton University - the only program of its kind in Canada. Alexandra Lamb conducted research at the Centre for Social Innovation in Trinity Business School as part of her Master's degree at Carleton University, under the co-supervision of Sheila Cannon (TCD) and Paloma Raggo (Carleton). The research focussed on the women's reproductive rights movement in Ireland that resulted in the 2018 referendum successfully repealing the 8th amendment of the Irish constitution, which had effectively outlawed abortion since 1984. We identified a new approach to issue framing, responsive framing, where activists worked together to understand and respond to public opinion. The results of this research form Alexandra's master's dissertation, a conference paper at ISTR (International Society of Third Sector Research) in Montreal, July 2020, and subsequently a peer reviewed publication.

This collaborative research was led by the Centre for Social Innovation, and included the Community Foundation Ireland and Trinity Development and Alumni. The goal was to investigate women philanthropists in Ireland including why and how they give, their preferences, and the causes they support. We interviewed 22 philanthropists and 8 philanthropy professionals, produced a report that was launched on International Women's Day in TCD; conference papers; with journal articles on the way.