Impact assessment of Village Host Initiatives

[massimo.menichinelli]

One of the big topics of any social initiative is to understand and communicate its social (but maybe also environmental and financial) impact of its activities. It’s not a simple task but luckily in the past years many frameworks, tools, reflections have emerged and are now avaible. It’s definitely getting easier to understand our own impact. I’m starting this topic so that we can discuss about the impact of Village Host initiatives and how to understand and communicate it.

[massimo.menichinelli]

I remember that in our last call @ella, @sarasimeone, @sanja were interested in this!

[massimo.menichinelli]

On my side, I’ve been working on this in the Maker Movement for a while, for example investigating which frameworks could be adopted and integrated on digital platforms, or by exploring the impact on well-being with digital tools.

Also understanding how many initiatives there are is a good way for starting assessing the impact of a movement, that’s one of the many reasons why having a map of village hosts is important.

[SaraSimeone]

Hi @ella @sanja @massimo-menichinelli and anyone else interested in impact assessment and communication.

From my side, I can share with you what I am trying to do for my association: I am trying to figure out the most appropriate framework / indicators / parameters to measure the impact of our initiative (linktr.ee/noiortadini).

Our main objective is to measure social impact. Trying to specify even further, and explaining the end objective in a simple way, we want happier and more connected community gardeners. Eventually, we will add environmental impact measurement in the future.

How are we proceeding?

• We have been keeping&updating a logbook of our activities and achievements in the last 3 years (which are our first 3 years)
• Now we are looking for existing frameworksin scientific papers about urban community agriculture
  • in Italian organisations that already have/offer frameworks (e.g. Avanzi; Next Impact)
  • in ISOs, Deming cycle, Theory of change and other “tools”
• We’re wondering the objectives, the feasibility, how often we will gather information, if through a digital form, if by single persons taking part or from other data sources, if subjective data with e.g. Likert scales or other; whether to have yearly evaluations or what

Any idea? Inspiration? Suggestion? Help?

Thaaaanks

[Author]

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