Projects

SFIP focuses on real-world projects, with minimum overhead and administration. We also convene workshops in support of practical objectives, and disseminate information to our wider community of interest, while building an innovation knowledge base and platform for all participants.

Our current projects in active development illustrate key facets of SFIP’s approach, and address such critical areas as energy, water, health, and community cohesion. They include:

Viejo/Nuevo

SFIP is partnered with the CATAPULTA social innovation festival in Oaxaca, Mexico, on Viejo/Nuevo, a “citizen diplomacy” initiative linking the social innovation ecosystems of Oaxaca and Santa Fe to foster collaborative engagement, exchanges, and projects. Program areas include arts and culture, entrepreneurial and economic development, and research and learning, with the goal of accelerating innovative solutions to social challenges confronting both communities, and other cities worldwide. Visit the project page here.

Microgrid Systems Lab

This partnership with the Sustainable Technologies Center at Santa Fe Community College and the Global Microgrid Center is designed to create a research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) laboratory for community scale (or “microgrid”) energy infrastructure, eventually branching out into telecommunications, water, traffic, emergency response, and integrated “smart systems” design. Technology, finance, regulation, user-centered design, testing and certification, and engineering will all be combined, with a workforce training and economic development component. The project has been endorsed by the New Mexico Federal congressional delegation, and the Santa Fe Regional Planning Authority’s Energy Task Force, with Resolutions in support passed by Santa Fe County and City; and it supports the United Nations’ Sustainable Energy for All initiative. Seed funding is provided by Los Alamos National Security. Please visit the MSL website here.

Portray.It

SFIP is working with artist Sydney Cooper to produce its inaugural “artist-driven innovation” project, in association with Santa Fe design studio Anagram. Originally conceived under the working title We the People, Portray.It is an interactive, web-based social platform that uses individual “self-portraits” as its building blocks. Portray.It redefines the act of self-portraiture for the digital age, connecting individual participants in real time to form a broad and continually shifting community of convergent interests. Portray.It combines art, psychology, sociology, and technology, with applications in fields ranging from the arts to education to science and social services, and will itself become essential infrastructure for SFIP’s community-scale laboratories. Read the project summary here, and sign up for more information here.

Finance Innovation & Impact Investing 

SFIP, in collaboration with Story of Place Institute, have received grants from several Santa Fe foundations to develop the IN Santa Fe (Impact Network Santa Fe) initiative. This finance innovation project will explore the potential for system-level, community-scale innovation in the local impact investing domain. The project began with a series of cross-sector workshops, engaging a broad range of community stakeholders, to develop ways to foster a coordinated effort that addresses funding, investment, entrepreneurism, and service delivery aspects, and aligns the needs and capacities of the private, public, and social sectors. Its current implementation stage is focused on developing pilot projects, and criteria and capability for community investments with multiple sources of funding, and return. Please visit the IN Santa Fe project website here.

Wellness as a Complex System

The Wellness as a Complex System project takes a systems approach to understanding an individual’s health and wellness, the community and cultural context, and the dynamic interplay between the two, in order to generate ideas for more effective policies and interventions. It will utilize principles of “user-centered design” in focusing on the individual’s perceptions; the technique of “agent-based modeling,” in seeing how the combination of many individuals creates larger-scale patterns and effects; and  insights from the science of “complex adaptive systems” in understanding how all this works together dynamically. Interested funders should contact the Project Director.

Water Resources

In collaboration with the Santa Fe Watershed Association, Santa Fe’s internationally recognized Regenesis Group, its affiliated Story of Place Institute, and other local partners, SFIP is developing a program for multi-stakeholder, community-based approaches to climate change adaptation. This will focus initially on the impacts of climate change on water resources, and seek to explore the opportunities for Santa Fe as a leader in “resource efficiency” for community and economic development. The outcome will be specific, tangible actions that demonstrate new ideas for water use (and re-use) efficiency, that can attract broad cross-sector support for implementation; and at a more general level, a change in the way we think about water and other limited resources, and the roots of sustainable development.

Applied Solutions Coalition 

ASC is comprised of a national network of counties and local governments with a vision of creating and implementing a federally funded program to accelerate change in three areas vital to national security: energy innovation, economic growth and greenhouse gas reductions.  SFIP is an Associate organization, co-sponsor, and co-organizer of the Coalition.

Code Green Energy Innovation Lab

SFIP will partner with the Business Innovation Factory to create a real world laboratory to accelerate the development of new alternative energy and energy conservation solutions for the home. The Code Green Energy Innovation Lab will include a network of homes and provide stakeholders with a better understanding of how citizens utilize and manage energy in the home, and within this real world environment, develop and test new solutions, services, and business models that increase energy conservation, advance the use of alternative energy solutions and decrease the country’s overall energy costs. Read the project brief here.

.