The Center for Social Innovation serves as an incubator of serious study and community dialogue to develop new ways of understanding and addressing critical social issues on Long Island.
Inaugurated in 2007, the Center advances Adelphi University’s role as an "engaged university". A major teaching and learning institution, Adelphi is a vital part of Long Island; both shaping and shaped by the region’s conditions and environment. Many of the social issues facing Long Island are complex and marked by different, sometimes polarizing, community perspectives. These contrasting views make finding sound, workable resolutions challenging. By sponsoring initiatives in thought leadership, community involvement, and student engagement, the Center provides opportunities for the dissemination and exchange of ideas and opinion and acts as a mediating force to assist communities with problem solving.
Vital Signs, a research-action project, and the main component of the thought leadership initiative, tracks and assesses the social health of Long Island residents and communities, and helps the Center to identify the region’s pressing social issues and areas of need. In this way, Vital Signs plays an important role in informing and guiding the Center’s approach to social innovation.
The Center believes that social innovation occurs when an enduring challenge has been more fully recognized and understood through study and participatory dialogue, ultimately leading to movement that resolves or ameliorates concerns. Key to this process are critical reflection, inquiry, and discourse as tools that lead to innovative ways of promoting the common good.
With guidance from an Advisory Board, representing community and university stakeholders, the Center adopted the controversial issue of immigration as a priority focus for the first two years of operation. In coming years, other pressing topics will be selected for two-to-three-year cycles of study, discussion, and subsequent evaluation of community impact.
Contact For more information, please contact:
Sarah Eichberg Director of Community Research
p - 516.877.4418
e - eichberg@adelphi.edu
