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Melinda Lewis
social policy, social work, advocacy, and community organizing analysis and commentary
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Measuring Social Impact
The Stanford Social Innovation Review had a special series on measuring social impact this spring, full of so many terrific insights that it took me quite awhile to sift through all of the articles and, then, compose my thoughts at least somewhat, to post here.
I’d love to discuss any of the pieces, and I welcome your responses to my reactions, too.
Above all, I’m very glad to see this conversation within this sphere; if we’re not asking what our true impact is, we’re missing the only metric that really matters:
Are we making the difference we intend, and that so desperately needs to be made?
The folks at SSIR have been leading the field on the question of how to really define ‘impact’, and so it’s not their oversight, but I do think that we, collectively, need to spend more time within our organizations, our profession, and our field really clarifying what impact means, and what it looks like, in order to ensure that we will, indeed, know it when we see it.
But maybe approaching it from this direction–how can we measure it, before we are necessarily sure what it is, should offer some appeal.
If one of the reasons we have excused ourselves from getting serious about setting the bar for ‘impact’ accurately has been that we don’t know how we will be able to know when we’ve reached it, then perhaps addressing the latter will light a fire under us for the former.
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