The Centre of Excellence for Social Good (CESG) serves as a key node to forge synergy among the non-profit, public and private sectors. CESG will engage in education, multidisciplinary research and collaboration that enhance the non-profit sector's capabilities and practices. It was launched on November 6, 2020 through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between SUSS and the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth (MCCY)'s Singapore Cares Office (SG Cares Office).
Advancing SUSS's Social Mission
CESG enables a network of organisations to collaborate and contribute their respective capabilities. This is achieved in the following ways:
- Training and Education - To provide learning as a platform for different communities to advance social good. Its current suite of non-profit management postgraduate programmes and certificate courses including the COC-SUSS Certificate in High Performing Charities are evidence-based and results-focused to build organisational capabilities towards solving existing and emerging problems. These higher-learning programmes and courses aim to enable participants to apply management and market disciplines to social causes that will enhance the performance of non-profit organisations. CESG will also open up opportunities for attachment, internship or service learning in the community where students will work on real community issues such as hoarding.
- Multidisciplinary Research - To draw on faculty expertise from different schools in applied research relevant to Singapore and Asia. Through research and knowledge creation, CESG aims to advance next practice and develop deep capabilities in the non-profit sector.
- Strategic Collaboration - To build an ecosystem in close collaboration with the people, public and private sectors, that will drive civic participation and increase civic capacity. We aim for a thriving ecosystem in the community that will nurture purposeful volunteerism and develop capabilities of volunteers to build skills that go beyond volunteerism to employment in the social and other sectors.
Champions of Social Entrepreneurship
As highlighted in the recent SkillsFuture report on the Care Economy, the People sector has several strategic skill gaps that need to be addressed. These strategic skills include "Thinking Critically", "Interacting with Others" and "Staying Relevant".
CESG has conducted applied research on this topic and has formulated a theory of change called the "7 Elements of Social Entrepreneurship". As seen in the diagram above, for each element, CESG focuses on a specific aspect, namely collective leadership for leadership, system thinking for strategy, social innovation for process, purpose for people, technology for knowledge, co-creation and co-delivery for citizens and social impact for results.