“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality… Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Martin Luther King, 1963
We are delighted to introduce the Transformative Service Collaborative (TSC) to the SERVSIG community!
The Transformative Service Collaborative is an innovative transdisciplinary collaborative for improving human well-being for individuals, families, cities, and society.
TSC was founded in 2016 by four enthusiastic Texas State service scholars who believe in improving human well-being through service (group picture below). We share a deep conviction that service researchers should collaboratively improve human service systems.
Founding team:
Steven Rayburn – Director
Sidney Anderson – Service Design Coordinator
Linda Nasr – Communication Coordinator
Ray Fisk – Ambassador
We know improving human well-being is much too big a problem for any one discipline to solve alone. To bring people together to solve these problems, the Transformative Service Collaborative serves as an innovative, inclusive, human-centered research and teaching platform. The Transformative Service Project is our general name for the many human-centered projects we hope to inspire.
In this regard, the Transformative Service Collaborative puts people first – in research, in teaching, and in service.
In our research initiatives, we seek national and global collaborations with like-minded scholars and like-minded organizations. We dream that our Collaborative will be a catalyst to unify the energies of scholars and students worldwide in pursuit of improving well-being for the people of our planet.
In our teaching initiatives, we seek to transform undergraduate students and graduate students into transformative service innovators and service designers. We hope to inspire future transformative service and social entrepreneurs. We will accomplish this by building transformative service perspectives into our business curricula and coursework.
Transformative service projects are a major focus of the Collaborative. We are developing an innovative approach that we call “Service Thinking”. Service thinking is a human-centered, inclusive perspective rooted firmly in the belief that all people deserve just service systems. Just service systems not only provide access, they are also equitable. As such, we focus on transforming broken service systems and designing new healthy service systems that collaboratively engage in mutually beneficial human relationships. In short, we seek the difficult task of creating service thinking projects that fix service systems so that fewer and fewer people need help. We will accomplish this by working side-by-side with the participants of broken service systems to design and implement service solutions that are innovative, honorable, and just.
We seek to improve access, reduce inequality, and prevent inequity in service systems through Transformative Service Innovation, Design, and Redesign projects in focal areas such as:
- Poverty and Hunger
- Education
- Physical and Mental Health
- Underserved: girls, women, minorities, refugees, etc.
We invite the SERVSIG community to join our efforts:
Transformative Service Collaboration Sign-up
Members of the TSC team will be attending and presenting our ideas at the QUIS conference in Porto, Portugal and then the Frontiers in Service Conference in New York City, USA this summer! Please attend our sessions, get in touch with us, and let’s collaborate on uplifting human well-being through service!
Steven, Sid, Linda and Ray
