How Might We: Exploring Housing and Climate Change as a Catamount Fellow
Blog by Stephanie Blencowe
Background
My journey into social innovation started when I took an introduction class in my first year at Mount Royal University (MRU). One of the class projects was to create a Google Site where we discussed the meaning of social innovation and changemaking. Completing the Catamount Fellowship felt like an extension of that journey, and I wanted this deliverable to continue that act of storytelling. As such I created a virtual book, or coffee table book as we are also calling it, for my deliverable.
Exploring this How Might We (HMW) question was a journey with distinct parts. First, it started with a focus on natural disasters, the insurance and the building industries. Then it moved into the area of cooperative housing, before landing in the final arena of education. Towards the end of the fellowship, my idea was that housing related costs of climate change needed to be part of general housing knowledge. I assumed that general housing knowledge would fall into an area of education; similar to reading literacy, I thought housing literacy would be its own type of category. However, I came to realize this concept was not as formalized as I expected.
The Work
The virtual book/coffee table book chronicles this story from its beginning focus on the insurance industry to exploring the question of what housing literacy is. Included below are two maps that show how this HMW question was explored within a systems perspective:
