We Must Urgently Prioritize the Sustainability of Impact

It is critical that we reimagine the way we talk about, measure, and define social impact

A couple of years ago, I was working with a Moroccan women’s rights organization, L'Association des Démocratique des Femmes du Maroc, and the global, Women's Learning Partnership as a part of my Ph.D. We were trying to figure out how to capture their leadership program’s impact on women's lives, and better understand how they conceptualized leadership after participating in the program. To do this, we conducted all the standard data collection methods, like surveys and interviews with program participants. During one of the interviews, a woman shared a story about her experience that profoundly shaped the way I understand data collection and evaluating impact. 

She told us a story about how she had traveled alone, by train, to participate, and this was an act of leadership.

For many of us, this would not be considered an obvious display of leadership. But for this woman who came from a conservative family living in a rural location, in order for her to come, she had to negotiate with her husband to get on a train by herself and negotiate social and family norms to travel. This was something she had never done before — it was a clear and pivotal moment of self-determination and leadership. 

As a data scientist working in and supporting the social justice sector, I had three main takeaways from this experience: 

1. Stories are at the center of everything we do — they are integral to developing a rich understanding of any person, event, context, or program. We need to prioritize their significance and value when it comes to measuring impact. 
2. Stories contain outcomes that can be mined for metrics and measurement. If we collect stories in a systematic way and take the time to code for outcomes in those stories, a rich picture of change begins to emerge at the aggregate level. These outcomes are most often missed. 
3. Every person is unique and experiences change differently. When evaluating the impact of a program or a movement, we need to afford the time and resources required to understand the full picture of our efforts, and how it affects people differently. 

These three ideas are central to the businesses I’m growing and to my own values as a social justice advocate. In the context of an increasingly fast-paced global economy where immediate results are often required by donors and funders, the tendency for the sector is to rely too heavily on easy-to-measure quantitative metrics. The individual experience of change is often deprioritized or left out, leading to an incomplete picture of change and impact. 

We know it will take 300 years to reach global gender equality and that the climate crisis is inevitable. Therefore,  it is absolutely urgent that we reconfigure the way we talk about, measure and define social impact. 

If we are to succeed in making progress on these significant global issues, we must develop programs that get to the roots of our problems, i.e., racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, colonialism, etc. People in communities affected by these inequities and discriminations are best positioned to define solutions, and in order to measure change and change processes, we must bring their voices and stories into the measurement process.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and trying to get to the root of how we demonstrate the need for greater investment in people and their stories as a key component of building happier, healthier families and communities. Like with the Morocco example, I’ve seen over and over again that when you provide space and time for people and their stories to be heard and considered, you are able to grasp a more holistic understanding of the impact of your work, and ultimately, a better understanding of how to ensure your impact is sustainable. 

So, in an effort to encourage more thoughtful conversations about data and impact tracking and the time and resources required to develop meaningful social justice programming that addresses the roots of the problem,

I’d like to kick off a discussion about what I’m calling the Sustainability of Impact (SOI) — where communities and people’s experiences, voices and wellbeing are centered in and at the forefront of social justice work.

Donors and investors looking to drive real, long-term change must start by prioritizing the physical and mental well-being of changemakers to support the longevity of change interventions and devote time and resources to capturing the stories behind their work. 

 The Sustainability of Impact is premised on three main ideas:

1. When we ignore the physical labor of those fighting for our rights, we risk losing those rights. Unfortunately, people working for grassroots social justice movements — and in particular, women and other marginalized communities — experience disproportionately high rates of burnout. We know that global issues like gender equality, climate justice, and human rights are often generations-long battles. It’s critical that donors and philanthropists listen to and trust the organizations they support and evolve funding models in a way that acknowledges and prioritizes the mental, physical, and financial wellness of the people doing this work.
2. The way that we measure and report on social justice work is broken — it never worked to begin with. Reporting mechanisms do not adequately account for the impact of grassroots organizing and social justice movements because their advocacy wins are challenging to measure, and the stories activists tell about their work are often left out of traditional progress reporting. In order to measure the true impact of this work and justify the long-term, sustainable funding of these groups, we need fit-for-purpose tools that measure the qualitative, story-based components and outcomes of advocacy and activism. Only by accurately capturing and evidencing the impact of this work will we see the indispensable value of movement-led organizing in upholding human rights, defending democracy, and holding governments and institutions accountable.  
3. Artificial intelligence and other technological innovations are transforming the way we measure and track social impact. In evaluating the effectiveness of new technologies, we must apply an intersectional feminist lens — one that considers qualitative, story-based data as crucial to understanding the impact of social justice movements and one that ensures that diverse voices are the foundation of machine-learning databases that are trained for predictive models in the future. If our goal is sustainable progress toward a better world for all, we need to prioritize innovations that account for and value diverse voices and grassroots activism.

What do you think about the Sustainability of Impact? Is this concept resonating with you as a funder or activist? I’ll be using this space to explore this concept further and discuss ways of supporting the social justice sector to advocate for the investment required to deliver meaningful change.

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