Study Visit in Scotland

The group then travelled to another area of Glasgow, Pollok, to visit the Centre for Civic Innovation. We were given an overview of how the Centre for Civic Innovation works, as well as two projects in the local community that they work closely with. The projects gave an overview of their work to the group. The first project was called the Village Storytelling Centre and is a project aimed at using storytelling as a medium to empower those in the local community who have been marginalized or are dealing with trauma in some form. The second project was a new approach to dealing with social housing issues from Sanctuary Housing. The approach is to understand the underlying causes of why tenants struggle to pay rent and develop issues with addiction, and how the housing officers can support them.

Following the morning visits, we took a bus to New Lanark, which is a World Heritage Site, and is a historic example of social innovation in Scotland in a cotton mill, where standards at the time for workers were hugely better in terms of housing, education, work standards, and quality of life for workers in the mill. We finished off the first day with a traditional Scottish dinner together, and some even went for whiskey tasting after this!

On the second day of the study visit, we met back at Glasgow Caledonian University campus to have a working lunch with Social Enterprise Academy and hear about their international and local programmes supporting and working closely with social impact and enterprise projects. The group then caught a train to Edinburgh to meet with the Melting Pot, one of the first co-working spaces in the UK and one of the first in Europe to support social enterprises when it started.

We finished off the visit with a trip to Challenges Worldwide who work to link the social impact and enterprise ecosystem in Scotland with global markets – in particular in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Those two days were definitely packed, but also full of learning experiences! It was very interesting for all of us to find out more about the different initiatives being done around Scotland to promote social innovation in sustainable ways! What really stood out was the importance of the involvement of the community in any and all forms of innovation. We’re looking forward to keeping updated with the work of these organisations, and potentially applying what we’ve learned in our own countries.

The study visit took place from September 29 to 30, 2022.