Taught By:
Adrian Griffin
Social Innovation Program Manager
David & Frances Brain Center for Community Engagement
Baldwin Wallace University
Adrian (she/her/hers) joins the Brain Center for Community Engagement as the social innovation program manager. She came from Case Western Reserve University's civic engagement office (in the division of student affairs) and she is passionate about connecting students with the civic space. Adrian's education is in community organizing and nonprofit management; she has previously worked and volunteered in the fields of criminal justice reform and youth development. She loves to travel, dabble in the creative arts and take advantage of all the wonderful assets here in northeast Ohio. Adrian is eager to meet more of the BW community and collaborate in launching this exciting new social innovation initiative!
Program Overview:
Brain Fellows strive to address today’s most complex and challenging social issues, while working to educate and empower the community to take action. Fellows engage in weekly seminars during the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 semesters to explore the nuances related to social change and leadership through learning from peers, community leaders, readings, and community events. Throughout the year, Fellows also design and implement a social change project that makes a sustained impact on or off-campus. Since social change does not happen in a silo, Fellows will be required to collaborate – either with peers in the program, other individual students or student clubs, or off-campus entities – to work on their project. While not required, it is strongly encouraged that Fellows collaborate on a project with at least 1 other student in the Fellows program as time will be spent during some sessions to work on action steps, and project work can be divided across members. The Fall semester is dedicated to refining your project focus, learning tools to apply to your project, and developing your action plan, while the Spring semester is heavily focused on project implementation.
New this year, Brain Fellows will engage with a national movement of students, staff, and faculty teaching and applying social action principles as a form of experiential learning. You’ll have the opportunity to apply changemaking tools such as campaign issue development, change theory, identifying stakeholders, building power, coalition work, applying strategy and tactics, and more while also learning about examples of inspiring student-led campaigns from across the country. Students are able to choose change projects that speak to any of their passion areas and that can be from any political ideology or none at all. Learning the tools of social action is critical to democratic engagement and can be applied to any changemaking efforts Fellows take on throughout their lives.