Jennie Winhall
Founder ALT/Now. Director Social Innovation at Rockwool Foundation
Jennie is a social innovator and service design expert. As an Associate with the Rockwool Foundation Intervention Unit, she provides leadership in social innovation and service design across program areas, developing teams and overseeing the design process from insight and innovation to start-up and scale. At the Foundation her practice combines two approaches: a service design approach that involves deep insight into people’s lived experience, design thinking, and rapid prototyping; and a social sciences approach that applies new knowledge and cutting-edge methods for evaluating what really works.
In addition to her work with the Intervention Unit, she collaborates with colleagues internationally on systems entrepreneurship and runs Alt/Now at the Banff Centre in Canada, an incubator for social ventures currently focused on economic inequality.
Previously, She was a founding member of Participle which was highly influential on public policy in the UK for their work rethinking issues like unemployment and an ageing population and scaling new solutions nationally.
She believes that to meet the new challenges faced by society we need fundamentally different responses and that requires imagination, rigorous experimentation and a whole-hearted embracing of uncertainty. Her interest is in redesigning systems on relational, rather than transactional, models. These models unlock new resources, generate meaningful relationships, and are strengthened through increased participation (rather than burdened by rising demand).