Proceedings of the 3rd Meeting of the Canadian Forum for Social Innovation

The third edition of the Canadian Forum for Social Innovation convened in Halifax from June 2–4, 2025, at a moment of profound transition. Across Canada and beyond, communities are navigating overlapping crises—affordability, housing, climate, equity, and trust in institutions—while simultaneously holding deep aspirations for more just, resilient, and regenerative futures. The Forum was designed as a space to pause, connect, and think together about how we might better align connectivity, capacity, and infrastructure to enable place‑based, mission‑driven innovation.

These proceedings capture the collective intelligence that emerged from five catalyst roundtables and a series of structured deliberative workshops and reflect the substance of discussion. Participants from community organizations, governments, academia, philanthropy, and social innovation intermediaries engaged in candid dialogue about what is working, what is failing, and what must change if we are to move beyond incremental responses to systemic challenges. While perspectives varied, a unifying insight surfaced repeatedly: transformation depends not only on ideas or funding, but on the quality of relationships, trust, and shared sense‑making across the ecosystem.

Connectivity—between sectors, disciplines, communities, and ways of knowing—was identified as both a persistent gap and a powerful lever. Participants emphasized the need to strengthen ecosystem intelligence, support mission‑oriented research and practice, value lived and Indigenous knowledge, and create governance and funding structures capable of holding complexity and emergence. Just as importantly, the Forum surfaced tensions that remain unresolved: between trust‑based and metric‑driven accountability, top‑down and bottom‑up governance, incremental reform and systemic rebuilding. These tensions are not weaknesses; they are signals of a field actively grappling with the scale of change required.

This report is an invitation—to policymakers, funders, researchers, practitioners, and communities—to continue the work of listening, connecting, and acting together. The insights documented here reflect both urgency and hope: urgency in the face of growing inequities, and hope rooted in the belief that, through intentional collaboration and shared purpose, different futures remain possible.