Aboriginal Women Empowerment: Social Innovation and Community Engagement

Running head: ABORIGINAL WOMEN EMPOWERMENT
ABORIGINAL WOMEN EMPOWERMENT
Name of the student:
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Table of Contents
Executive summary:...................................................................................................................2
social innovation and community engagement theory:..............................................................2
Proposed social innovation:.......................................................................................................4
Implications of proposed social innovation:..............................................................................5
Conclusion:................................................................................................................................8
References:.................................................................................................................................9

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Executive summary:
This report aims to discuss social innovation as a concept to be utilized in increasing the
community engagement in the region of Aboriginal and Torres strait Island of Australia. This
report has discussed the functions of a non-profit organization named Aboriginal Community
Controlled Organization (Absec.org.au 2018). It mainly works for the aboriginal
communities because it is operated and controlled by the communities themselves. This
organization has aimed to provide education to the aboriginal girls and younger women. In
addition to this, the organization will be providing all necessary trainings and vocational
courses to the community women so that they can utilize their merits and become as
productive as men. This will decrese the incidents of immature mortality and domestic
violence in which cases, the women become sole suffers. Through this social innovation, the
aboriginal women will have opportunity to get education which will reduce discrimination
(Registry 2018). This paper has discussed diffusion of innovation by Rogers through which
the organization will be able to understand the impact of the social innovation as well as the
communities’ response towards the change. This paper concludes with some challenges
which need to be overcome as early as possible so that the change can have economic, ethical
and environmental effect at its best.
social innovation and community engagement theory:
Social innovation is a new approach with sets of concepts and ideas that aims to meet
all the social needs of the communities. This can be related with the various elements like
education, health and employment of the communities. Social innovation focuses on the
social progress by using various open source methods (Gill 2015). All of these techniques
have one specific aim that is increasing community involvement and for doing this, the
organizations follow various paths such as microcredit, online volunteering and activism. The

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theory of social innovation and community engagement has various facets like social
entrepreneurship, governance and social marketing. There are diverse of actors which
introduce these social innovations to the communities. These are mainly the independent
organizations, non-profit institutions, research academies and various companies. The chief
focus of social innovation theory is to change the perspectives of the people so that the
communities may meet all of their necessities and for these functions, all he needed changes
can take place.
There is a basic difference between the social work and the social innovation. Social
work is to help the communities in various ways but social innovation has a connotation of
empowering these communities in all-inclusive ways. Social innovation gives priority to the
internal functions of the institutions so that productivity can be increased. From the
perspective of community engagement, social innovation aims to maximize the power of the
individuals along with the groups so that the willingness for changing social relations
increases. Social innovation utilizes the common goal of the countries and help them to
achieve their goals.
According to the theory of diffusion of innovation by Everett Rogers, diffusion is a
process by which innovation can be communicated through certain channels over time and
among the members of a particular social system (Rogers and Shoemaker 1971). For
empowering the communities, the communication is vital because it is a process in which the
participants create as well as share their acquired information with one another for reaching a
mutual understanding. In case of diffusion of innovation, the communication is about new
approach and for this, understanding of the process is important. This helps in improving
community engaged efforts for spreading the innovative processes.