Price launches new social innovation education program

This month, the USC Price Center for Social Innovation will unveil a new professional development program — the Southern California Symposium. Participants will investigate the social problems existing in Southern California — ranging from housing to educational opportunities — and work to develop practical solutions.

The core of the program will take place at USC over four weekends from February to May. Twenty-five individuals will be selected from a pool of applicants for the opportunity to receive an Executive Education Certificate in Social Innovation upon completion of the course.

The course is designed for professionals seeking to expand their knowledge, enhance their value as employees and solve problems that benefit the community.

The curriculum for the program — the first of its kind from the Price Center — is the product of more than 20 interviews conducted by USC professor Roberto Suro, the director of the symposium.

“I spent a lot of last summer in a set of conversations with a lot of different people,” Suro said. “I interviewed people who were involved with philanthropy, thinkers that I respected, public officials, politicians, some academics and asked them, ‘If someone asked you to do this, what would you do?’ And over time, a few things started to coalesce.”

The objective is to solicit ideas from some of the region’s greatest minds in order to construct an ideal program for students.

Suro collaborated with USC Price professor and Price Center Director Gary Painter, as well as senior visiting fellow and director of studies for the spring 2018 symposium, David Morse, to develop the course.

Each weekend session will feature a distinguished leader or advocate from a non-governmental organization. Participants will also have the chance to converse with panels of local policymakers and hear prominent scholars give insight into issues like housing, transportation and economic development in Southern California.

Unlike most programs, the topics covered in the course are not limited to those selected by the faculty.

Students are encouraged to bring in issues from their professional fields for discussion and collaboration in search of solutions.

Additionally, the learning continues beyond the weekend sessions.

As Painter points out, the course is intended to be both theoretical and pragmatic.

“One of the goals of the symposium is not just to teach people new approaches to solving these kinds of problems but also to have them actually do something practical,” Painter said.

The course employs case studies to accomplish this. Working online and in small groups, students will team up with faculty to tackle various social problems in Southern California. Their efforts will culminate in a specific policy solution, which they will present at a fifth session in June.

Although participants will come from diverse backgrounds, Morse hopes to give them cases that expand their scopes and push them to learn outside of their designated fields.

“We’ll try to make sure each person is working on something that relates to their work but also takes them beyond the boundaries of their own experience and training,” Morse said in a USC Price Center news release.

While the issues addressed in the program center around Southern California, Painter explained that the principles are applicable anywhere.

“The approaches that are inherent in social innovation are just general approaches and processes for how you address problems that are different from our traditional approaches in the social sector,” Painter said.

Suro expanded on the course’s relevance outside of the region.

“A lot of the issues you see elsewhere,” Suro said. “Issues like gentrification or the move away from automobile transport to other forms of transportation or the desire to do that. Issues like homelessness … Those are all common to a lot of metropolitan areas but the intent is to do something that is regionally focused and to make this about a place.”

The program’s ultimate goal is to study the long-term challenges here, in Southern California, and develop solutions that will positively impact the people living in the region, Suro said.