NGO Education Survey

Social Entrepreneurship in the Digital Age

The fast-paced development of new digital technologies provides powerful resources for addressing today's social and environmental challenges. Combining the perspectives of business entrepreneurship, regional science and information systems, this breadth unit will uncover the potential of digitally connected social entrepreneurship as an agile and exciting vehicle for creating positive social and environmental change. This unit will provide you with a dynamic suite of online resources and activities to develop the knowledge and skills required to become agents for positive social change. By identifying an issue of significance within their local, national or global communities, you will develop and "pitch" your own socially entrepreneurial initiative. To achieve this, you will assess the strengths of a number of resources and tools that may be utilised by social entrepreneurs, including Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). While not a prerequisite, if you have previously completed the breadth unit XBR102 Developing your Creative and Entrepreneurial Potential, you will have the opportunity to further develop and test your existing enterprise ideas.

Social Innovation and Sustainability and 21st Century Social Work

Social workers confront ever-increasing impacts of social suffering arising from ever widening and deepening disparities of power and privilege in local and global contexts. This unit equips you with intersectional analysis skills, theoretical knowledge and practice skills to understand, confront and respond to the multiple impacts of social injustice and human rights neglect and abuses. The unit begins by examining the contested nature of contemporary life and how history has shaped how social work has responded to social, cultural, economic and political problems. Attention then turns to social sustainability principles, theories and contexts and what this means for innovating social work practice in the 21st century. You will explore new ways of working for sustainable social change, including practices that engage communities in meaningful ways. Case studies focusing on issues such as climate change, racial and ethnic conflicts and poverty are a focus. You can expect to engage in processes of self and collective critical reflection, mutual enquiry, group discussions, role plays and dialogical learning as they explore the global and local contexts of how social innovation and sustainability form a part of social work in the 21st century.