Conference session

Beyond the Band Aid: Social Innovation Across Systems is a roundtable session that explores a central question: how can social work move beyond crisis response to actively reshape the systems that produce inequities? Grounded in macro practice, this session examines how social innovation can strengthen the profession’s role across policy, education, employment, and community sectors. While social innovation is widely applied in other fields, its integration within social work remains limited. This session invites participants to consider how community rooted knowledge, organizational leadership, and interdisciplinary collaboration can be leveraged to drive structural change. Using the evolution of Developing Young Leaders of Tomorrow, Today into the Organization for Equity, Development, and Diversity as a case example, the discussion will highlight how a community based organization transitioned from frontline service delivery to systems level intervention, policy engagement, and institutional design. Participants will engage with key insights from OEDD’s baseline research and strategic redesign, including how gaps between social work and public policy were identified. The session will then open into facilitated dialogue on the importance of policy literacy, the implications of social work’s exclusion from decision making spaces, and strategies to reposition the profession as a driver of systems change. This session is designed for social workers, students, nonprofit leaders, and policymakers seeking to expand their impact. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of social innovation, practical strategies for influencing policy and governance, and tools to build cross sector collaborations that advance equitable and sustainable change.