SocialChange101 is a free online educational resource and youth workshop series for students of social change. If you want to make a difference, we hope you find ideas and inspiration here.
You can treat this website like an on-line course in how to change the world. Or use it more like a tool shed—poke around for what you need to get the job done. In any case, if you want to learn something meaningful from this website, it is up to you to decide how to connect these ideas and stories to your own life.
Online Course
Our free online course offers interactive multimedia on the history, philosophy, and practice of social change. The backbone of the course are case studies of five social entrepreneurs—Andrew Carnegie, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Rosa Parks, and Rachel Carson. Through videos, text, games, and other tools, we invite you to decide for yourself what empowered these five people to have a massive impact on the world. And we challenge you to consider how you can bring those lessons into your own world.
Workshops
We are bringing this site into our world via a series of youth workshops. These workshops focus on media literacy and the power of art and storytelling as forms of social change. The workshops culminate in student-produced videos that highlight local community organizations. These videos enrich the SocialChange101 website, creating a living tool, forged by students for students.
Our Philosophy
SocialChange101 began with the idea that education is a form of social change. We seek to do what Carl Sagan and Rachel Carson did for science, but for social change: share knowledge in a publicly accessible format, and call people to action. We draw inspiration from MOOCs, especially those that use diverse media, flow into social networks, supply links to other resources, and incorporate face-to-face learning opportunities for students. We are also inspired by all those who have connected education and social change: the freedom schools of the civil rights movement, the Highlander Folk School, the literacy programs of Paolo Freire.
We believe in learning as a path to a better world. We believe in education as social change.
To begin the course, click on any image below:
SocialChange101 is generously supported by the Department of History and the Dietrich College of Humanities & Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Additional support has been provided by the Hive Fund for Connected Learning at The Sprout Fund, The Grable Foundation, and by the Center for Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon.