How to measure the unmeasurable: Social Impact
After almost two weeks working with our NGOs and sustainable Enterprises one fact is for sure: all of them create a major impact, but in different ways and on different timelines.
Whilst for example Nilus has a direct impact on a very vulnerable community of people living in Barrio 31 of Buenos Aires to deliver affordable food, Unplastify has a broader vision which impact will be visible in a couple of years. Working directly connecting to a neighbourhood selling affordable and healthy food even the grateful faces of people is a valuable payoff for what you are doing. For more information you have to watch out what Veronika and Niels are sharing in their blogs.
Unplastifys vision is to create new habits of using alternatives to single use plastic. As everyone knows to adapt a new habit takes a long time and to inspire enough people to follow this, is a marathon not a sprint. But to leave a better world behind we all need to change habits and it is definitivly worth it: if only 1 million people reduce the single use of plastic by 20% for 5 years, 10 Million tons less plastic will be used and put to nature.
In a clever combination of engaging young people, collaborate with big companies and even engaging with local politics to ban e.g. plastic straws from communities, they can calculate an assumption of avoided plastic for the future as they know the weight of each single item in focus of “unplastification”.
But how to measure the change of behaviour and something you are not doing anymore? It is about creating assumptions based on the usage before people got in touch with Unplastify or the amount of waste which was created in a community before regulations were imposed. Unfortunately regulations are one of the most sufficient way of lower the amount as restaurants or other public places have to follow the rule.
Different to Germany the waste is not handled centraly by the governments in Agentina. As a result of this Unplastify could not learn from local organization how mix of waste changes but has to find its own way of calculating the impact. We are now in the middle of week two already in the preparation of ideas of new way of reporting the long term success of Unplastifies activities. Keyfigures can support you on various ways to tell your story and engage more people, but you have to focus on the few relevant to support you story.
As you see, where there is light there is always some shadow. And we are aware of all sights of Buenos Aires. Each and every NGO in our Social Sabbatical has its very own impact, not easy to measure, but higly valuable for the Argentinien growth and society.
