In Winnipeg’s Point Douglas neighbourhood, a powerful and deeply community-rooted movement is redefining what innovation can look like. Winnipeg Boldness is an Indigenous-led social innovation lab that places community voices, lived experience, and Indigenous knowledge systems at the center of social change. Through collaboration, relationship-building, and systems thinking, the organization is helping create new pathways toward wellbeing for children and families in Point Douglas, across Manitoba, and beyond.
At the heart of Winnipeg Boldness is a bold and hopeful vision: that children and their families will experience dramatically improved wellbeing in all aspects of self — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Rather than approaching social issues with one-size-fits-all solutions, the organization works alongside community members to identify challenges, uncover strengths, and co-create meaningful responses grounded in local realities and aspirations.
Built on the practice of social innovation, Winnipeg Boldness develops community-driven approaches to complex issues such as poverty, racism, housing insecurity, and inequitable access to services. The organization uses the social innovation lab platform to bring together community members, Elders, families, Knowledge Keepers, service providers, and partners to explore challenges, gather community insight, co-create new ideas, and test solutions that respond directly to local needs.
Labs are essential for addressing complex social challenges because they bring together diverse stakeholders in a collaborative environment.
Through the iterative process of prototyping and testing interventions, Winnipeg Boldness ensures that solutions are effective and sustainable by grounding them in lived experience. These prototypes evolve into strength-based, holistic, community-led initiatives that can be scaled through cross-sector partnerships.
Winnipeg Boldness focuses on transforming systems by recognizing the wisdom already present within the community and providing the tools, relationships, and expertise needed for locally led ideas to grow, demonstrate impact, and create lasting change. In doing so, the organization helps shift the narrative away from solutions imposed onto communities and toward solutions imagined, designed, and led by community itself.
As an Indigenous-led initiative, Winnipeg Boldness is deeply grounded in trust, relationships, and lived experience. Its work is guided by community members, Elders, Aunties, families, and Knowledge Keepers whose teachings and perspectives shape every stage of the process. By weaving together traditional knowledge and modern innovation practices, the organization creates approaches that are both culturally rooted and forward-looking.
Over time, Winnipeg Boldness has become recognized as one of the leading Indigenous organizations in Canada using the social innovation lab platform, as well as one of the country’s longest-running Indigenous social innovation labs. Its work has become a model for how Indigenous leadership and community collaboration can drive meaningful and sustainable transformation.
Underlying every aspect of the organization is a strong values framework centered on holistic wellbeing, interdependence, self-determination, trust, and non-judgement. Winnipeg Boldness recognizes that people, systems, and communities are deeply interconnected, and that lasting change happens through relationships, reciprocal support, and honouring the strengths that already exist within individuals and families. The organization’s non-judgmental and strength-based approach ensures people are met with dignity, respect, and care, wherever they may be in their journey.
Winnipeg Boldness has been a pacesetter in the creation of a robust Indigenous social innovation ecosystem in Manitoba and across Canada for over a decade. Diane Roussin—President and CEO of Winnipeg Boldness—is recognized as a leader in the field of Indigenous social innovation, highly sought after nationally and internationally by those looking to learn from this work. Inspired by this success policymakers, community organizations, and government organizations are calling for help employing Indigenous methods in acts of reconciliation, Boldness answers that call by centering Indigenous knowledge systems in defining social problems and building solutions.
As conversations around innovation continue to evolve, Winnipeg Boldness offers an inspiring reminder that some of the most impactful solutions emerge not from institutions alone, but from community wisdom, collective action, and the power of people coming together with a shared vision for the future.
