4 - Impact, change and making a difference

Summary

‘We find it very difficult to measure the impact of what we do in communities. My colleagues, we all feed into a database system, and your success is generally measured on your learners gaining certification, but the majority of our learners don't gain certification, but their family and community life improves tremendously. And how do we capture that to feed up to the funders? To say, yes, keep the funding coming, we’re doing good work here. That's something we’ve been trying to develop over many years now and COVID, I suppose, slowed down things a bit, but it is very difficult to try and devise a mechanism that we can measure the quality and the impact of the work we do.’ (Aine Whelan, 2022, Focus Group)

Introduction

The quotation that opens this chapter illustrates some of the challenge associated with showing impact. Community work can be used for a range of purposes, but we find that the most common overarching goal for community work is to strive for the well-being of individuals and groups in the community and wellbeing of the community itself. The ‘well-being’ of communities is of course a contested concept, but here we use it to define, for the individual, a sense of living in hope; and for the community, a shared spirit of hope. Hope is an optimistic way of thinking about the world and implies an expectation of positive outcomes (McArdle et al, 2020). A community focus is common in many different work contexts but, when we are looking for evidence of impact, it is usually change we are seeking to achieve. We should not, however, rule out stasis or continuity as objectives.

Case study

In the following case study, Alan discusses setting up a community larder to meet the needs of people living in poverty in one suburb of the city of Dundee in Scotland. He is focusing on gathering evidence.

‘Maybe it is about trust in your own observations more. So, food insecurity: over the summer we did engagement with loads of people through community events about setting up a food larder. We got eight volunteers, some of whom have got really quite difficult circumstances themselves, some of whom are further on in terms of their capacity.