Shawn Smith is an Adjunct Professor and Special Advisor to the Dean on Social Innovation at the Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University. Shawn will be speaking about why international development isn't working, how we're missing the point, and the role he hopes social innovation and entrepreneurship will play in the future of development.
Through his international work over the years, Shawn has touched nearly 20 countries in 5 continents. He is the founder of Global Agents for Change, a "social innovation incubator" developed in 2006 to support innovative solutions to global poverty. Some of the initiatives that have emerged out of Global Agents for Change include Education Generation, the Global Catalyst Initiative, and Radiant Carbon.
Shawn believes that international development is broken because it is based on questionable assumptions about the West's role in "helping" developing nations. As the West has tried to "save" other nations, it has replaced alternative cultures and approaches to how economies and societies could function with unsustainable models. Global warming, ecosystem decline, questionable financial systems and governance models have negatively impacted nations around the globe. By limiting our ideas of how development can work, we are, in fact, limiting our collective progress.
Shawn's passion is to work with emerging leaders and entrepreneurs, helping new ideas that address poverty and sustainability to grow and prosper. His greatest hope is that by embracing new and innovative ideas in international development, we can overcome the poverty of imagination that currently defines human "progress".
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