The Project on Social Innovation builds on the Ash Center's existing capacity to generate, gather, and share knowledge on how communities are transforming their approaches to social issues. The Project identifies and engages civic leaders and entrepreneurs that are successfully transforming their community’s approach to social service delivery.

From 2008 to 2010, the Ash Center convened the Executive Session on Transforming Cities through Civic Entrepreneurship. With support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Executive Session sought to change the environment in which communities solve their social problems. Out of these discussions came a series of working papers, columns and a new book, The Power of Social Innovation: How Civic Entrepreneurs Ignite Community Networks for Good (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, March 2010) by Stephen Goldsmith with Gigi Georges and Tim Glynn Burke.

Thanks to renewed support from the Knight Foundation, in 2011 the Project on Social Innovation launched an online hub for driving social innovation and community engagement in cities and municipalities. The site’s purpose is to provide a practical platform for sharing the stories and lessons of exciting innovators from the nonprofit, philanthropic and public sectors. The site offers an innovator’s toolkit, relevant news updates, profiles of best practices, regular blogging, and links to other online resources.

With new support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the team also launched in 2011 its Innovation Strategies Initiative, a year-long hands-on effort to help mayors become effective catalysts for innovation.