The Center for Institutional and Social Change is a collaborative response to the pressing need for new frameworks and approaches for effective institutional change.

Mission

Founded in 2007, the Center for Institutional and Social Change (the “Center”) has become a facilitator of innovation and collaboration for researchers, practitioners, and students striving to address structural inequality through institutional transformation. Housed at Columbia Law School and begun as a pilot collaboration with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), the Center’s overarching goal is to revitalize the role of institutions in a democracy.  It pursues this goal through inquiry aimed at identifying frameworks, strategies, roles, and policies that advance full participation and, in the process, enable effective public problem solving.   Its work examines affirmative visions and concrete examples of movement toward full participation in institutions defining 21st century “citizenship”, and initiatives aimed at transforming those institutions to enable inclusion and effective public problem solving. This work includes systematic and sustained examination of institutional stasis and change, as part of the effort to understand frames and strategies for effective institutional transformation.

The Center explores the nature of the university as a site of social action within the broader contemporary society. The Center continually asks what does it mean to have the university engaged in connecting research, teaching and practice to projects of inclusion?  Through its method and goals, the Center strives to enable higher education to act as a catalyst for integration of knowledge, values and practice.  It focuses and informs the inquiry about how to address society’s most pressing problems through relevant reflection, capacity building and problem-oriented knowledge development.

What We Do

The Center works primarily through projects in different institutional settings, such as higher education, low-wage work, criminal justice, and housing.  Each of the projects brings together creative and committed researchers, practitioners, and students to address problems involving structural inequality, and to do so through examining innovation. The projects conduct interdisciplinary studies, develop research/practice networks, and communicate their learning through publications, websites, educational programs, workshops and conferences.  The Center uses this project-based work to develop cross-cutting frames, strategies and methodologies that can be used by researchers, practitioners, and policy makers seeking to understand how to advance inclusion and public problem solving through institutional transformation.

These Center-supported collaborative projects are designed to develop (1) multi-method, multi-disciplinary research on the frameworks, mechanisms, and dynamics of institutional change, (2) reflective practice and action research conducted in conjunction with the development of initiatives to advance full participation and public problem solving, (3) publications, websites, workshops, and conferences to share the Center’s learning with multiple audiences; (4) tools to aid researchers and change agents in pursuing and assessing institutional transformation, (5) inquiry groups and networks of innovative change agents occupying strategic locations to share knowledge, (6) educational programs and seminars that involve students and practitioners in this research and in developing the skills necessary to undertake this work as researchers and practitioners; and (7) methodologies and spaces for collaboration among the relevant researchers, practitioners, and policy makers.