A new learning and action hub at McMaster is working to address pressing social challenges facing Hamilton residents, including barriers to financial inclusion.

The new Social Impact Hub brings together non-profit organizations, businesses, government and academia to co-design solutions to problems like financial exclusion, which refers to a lack of access to affordable credit.

It presents a barrier to a significant portion of the Hamilton population, with more than 13 per cent of households reporting they rely on fringe financial services like payday loans.

Financial exclusion disproportionately affects certain groups, including racialized communities, newcomers, single parents, people with disabilities, and youth in precarious work or housing. Racialized households are twice as likely to be underbanked, and gender diverse individuals face heightened barriers to financial services.

“What we are doing here is intensely local and community-engaged,” says Social Impact Hub founder Brent McKnight, an associate professor of Strategic Management at DeGroote.

“There’s a large community in Hamilton that’s experiencing poverty, and we want to catalyze understanding, solutions, and ultimately create a stronger society. We are starting with financial exclusion.”

The Social Impact Hub’s financial inclusion pilot project is a cross-sector initiative looking to support local non-profit partners — the YWCA Hamilton, Mishka Social Services, Good Shepherd, United Way Halton & Hamilton, and Empowerment Squared — so they can better address their clients’ needs.

“Non-profit organizations frequently deal with clients who are facing financial inclusion problems, whether they’re recent immigrants, precariously employed or reintegrating following incarceration,” McKnight says.

“If you’re not financially included, then you are at risk of taking predatory loans or worse.”

The Social Impact Hub draws on McKnight’s expertise in experiential learning, regularly teaching live cases in his undergraduate and MBA-level strategy classes and designing courses like Innovation for Social Impact, where non-profits can participate and learn side-by-side with McMaster students.

Non-profit, for-profit, government, and academic sectors are intimately connected with financial exclusion challenges, McKnight says; and productively engaging stakeholders from these sectors is key to the Social Impact Hub’s approach.

“One of our goals with this hub is to bring for-profit actors into meaningful engagement with this work,” says McKnight. “Our partners are choosing to leverage business solutions to help improve society.”

Participants at the Hub’s first event shone a light on some critical factors that make financial exclusion challenging.

One such factor is distrust: “Credit is calculated against people, not with them,” one participant said.

Others highlighted how confusing bureaucracy and fragmented support systems obscure solutions for individuals experiencing a financial crisis.

Insights from the event will be used to co-create solutions with local organizations. In addition, discussions from the event will help generate opportunities for students in undergraduate and graduate programs for problem-based learning within DeGroote’s curriculum.

About the Social Impact Hub 

The Social Impact Hub will be housed in the new McLean Centre for Collaborative Discovery. The dedicated physical space will serve as a “learning laboratory” for students, researchers and community partners, McKnight says.

“When you create a meeting space, you can catalyze collaboration,” he says. “We want the Social Impact Hub to feed and engage with our undergraduate and MBA students through special events like GRIT week and the final year consulting course. The Social Impact Hub gives us a forum to do that and to teach students the importance of working across sectors in new ways.”

The Social Impact Hub is powered by passionate DeGroote students and recent alumni, including Avery Tedesco, Lama Al-Amodi and Hala Arafeh.