

Solutions Lab ran from 2016 to 2025. It was housed in Social Policy and Sustainability Group and collaborated with many departments at the City of Vancouver, as well as several community partners named in the projects below. City staff continue to embed and build their own practices related to social innovation and systems change.
This webpage contains information, publications, and learnings from past projects and Solutions Lab processes.
Tools and resources
We’ve curated the most important foundations and tools used in our practice, and made them open source for easy use by our fellow social innovators. This has been done in collaboration with the University of British Columbia, and with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
To access these resources, visit Transforming Cities from Within External website, opens in new tab
Tending to What We Want to Grow PDF file (4.7 MB)
Navigating Complexity - The story of the Solutions Lab PDF file (7.8 MB)
Our city is facing increasing pressure to address complex challenges like reconciliation, affordability, equity, climate change, sustainability, social isolation, falling trust in government, and many others. The go-to structures and processes of local governments were set up for very different purposes, challenges, and responsibilities than those we face now, and if governments don’t adapt we’ll be left behind.
We’re being called, both as individual public servants and as an organization, to experiment, learn, and scale new solutions in response to these pressures. We’re being called to respond to the root causes of these systemic challenges, not just apply incremental quick fixes.
The Solutions Lab is a response to this call.
Recent projects
We are grateful to be on the unceded and traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
We are working to innovate within a colonial institution, and are particularly grateful for the gifts of knowledge about Indigenous ways of thinking, being, knowing, and doing that we have received, and are doing our best to integrate into our selves and practices each day.