Ann Dill gives her students a toolbox for change. As a professor at Brown, she taught courses like Investing in Social Change that immerse students in the theory and practice of philanthropy. Here she explains how she learned from a young age that "the only way to make change was to make waves." 

Liza: How do you define social innovation?

Ann: I think of social innovation as rethinking what’s wrong. You have to question fundamental assumptions, binaries, premises, procedures, and want to make a change that will make things work more efficiently, more effectively, more ethically, more kindly, more compassionately, more lovingly.

What is your personal motivation for exploring social innovation?

A: I’ve always been upset by social inequalities. I grew up in a very conventional family in a part of the world that might as well have been back in the 19th century in some ways. There were crossing guards to make sure that the traffic would stop and the kids could cross the street safely. Only boys were allowed to be crossing guards. They got to wear a neat white sash with a badge and hold up a sign and they had some authority. And it just didn’t make any sense to me that a girl couldn’t do it. So I got a group of my friends together and we wrote a petition and took it to the principal of the school to ask that girls be allowed to be crossing guards. And she called us all into her office and said don’t ever do that again. She said this. But the next year, girls were allowed to be crossing guards. So on the one hand I was being told “don’t make waves” and on the other hand I saw that sometimes the only way to make change was to make waves. Social injustice just does not make any sense at any level to me - it never did. So it’s a question of how do you get at it, how do you root it out?

Where do sociologists fit in to changemaking?

A: Well, if we don’t do it I don’t know who will. We try to understand why there is social injustice and we try to understand it not just at a political level but at the level of knowledge creation and distribution of economic resources in terms of cultural ideologies. We’re putting all the pieces together: the political, economic, cultural, social, interactional, individual, macro-level, industrial-level. None of these problems is one-dimensional. They all have multiple possibilities for change but also multiple barriers to making change. So you need as many tools in your tool chest as you can get and sociology has a lot of them.

I’m already aware of an issue that I’m passionate about changing. Why should I study social theory?

I think otherwise you get lost in the trees. Each case can be so particular and so troublesome, whether that’s the case of an individual whose life is in turmoil or an organization that isn’t working well or a community that’s at loggerheads. The closer you look at any case, the messier it’s going to be. So how do you make sense of it?

You have to have some concepts that give you some way in, so you can say “okay, what’s happening in congress right now is pretty much what happened in my child’s playground the other day.” The advantage of theory is that I can take an organization from Croatia, an organization from the US, an organization from Kenya, and I can tell you something about the difficulties they share or the strategies they’re trying because I have an overarching theoretical framework. It enables you to see commonalities and forests instead of just trees.

What are some examples of sociology students applying classroom concepts to social change?

One of my former students did his thesis with me on social enterprise in Rhode Island, and he became the in-house director of voluntary activity and philanthropy at Google. That’s him – that wasn’t me. But I did help smooth his way a bit; I provided the pathways down which he ran faster than I could ever keep up. I’ve got a student who’s working for City Year in the Boston office, and I’ve got a student who’s interning in the first lady’s office in the White House. These are people who’ve worked their way into organizations that are directly involved in public, private, and nonprofit social change about as much as you can be.