Bring us your challenge.
We help find the right experience.

The people closest to a challenge are often furthest from the decisions about it. The SINA Expert Network connects organizations with people across the SINA ecosystem whose lived or practiced experience is relevant to a real challenge. This brings lived and practiced expertise into the room.

SINA Experts include social entrepreneurs, practitioners, facilitators, replicators and people who understand particular contexts from the inside.

Bring us your challenge. We help find the right experience.

Expertise built through doing

Across SINA, people develop capability through real responsibility by running self-organized Communities, building social enterprises, facilitating teams, managing resources, supporting others and carrying the SINA Framework into new contexts. This creates two kinds of expertise gained from doing the work:

1. Lived and contextual expertise
   First-hand understanding of particular communities, markets, social or environmental challenges and lived realities across over 10 countries.
   
2. Practiced expertise
   Experience with areas such as self-organization, freesponsibility, personal development, learning through real responsibility, social entrepreneurship, facilitation, local ownership and replication.

Meet some of the people behind the expertise

Across SINA, people have built social enterprises, led self-organized Communities, supported entrepreneurs and worked through challenges firsthand. Here are three examples of the expertise you can access through the SINA Expert Network.

What challenge are you working on?

You might be asking:

• How can people closest to a challenge shape a program before decisions are fixed?
• How can we understand a local market or context before developing a product?
• How can we create stronger local ownership?
• How could people learn through real responsibility?
• How can we distribute responsibility without losing accountability?

You do not need to know which expert you need. Reach out to us, we will do the rest.

How we can work together

The format follows the challenge. It could be:

The SINA Network has grown to over 200 experts with diverse skills, backgrounds and knowledge from collaborations that have already happened around SINA, from contextual and market research to organizational learning, product development and questions around self-organization. We are now making this distributed expertise accessible to you.

What working with a SINA expert can look like

For a shower-design project described publicly by PHOENIX Design, Mary Apolot coordinated a locally rooted research team of six people in Uganda. Franco Lemi and five other team members contributed as R&D experts, with Franco focusing particularly on experiences from Bidibidi Refugee Settlement.

Working across several locations, the team conducted household interviews, participated in design workshops and gathered evidence from people familiar with these contexts from the inside. The work brought knowledge from Ugandan households into the design process early. Rather than being asked to react to an already completed idea, local researchers helped investigate how people use water, what constraints they experience and what a useful design would need to take into account.

Mary later travelled to PHOENIX Design in Stuttgart, where she shared how people in SINA develop solutions: by speaking with potential customers, testing ideas in real settings, learning where assumptions are wrong and changing course.

This is one example of what the SINA Expert Network can make possible: bringing together a locally grounded research team whose members understand the communities and contexts being studied. Their lived experience can inform decisions that would otherwise be made at a distance.

Read PHOENIX Design’s account of the collaboration →

Learning across organizations

Bring us your challenge

Tell us what you are working on. We will explore who across the SINA ecosystem could meaningfully contribute. Write to info@socialinnovationacademy.org with the subject “Challenge” and we can set up a free exploratory call.