creating impact

in my job at akanksha - i was heading up impact measurement.
we were putting down some quantitative and qualitative measures to see and show how effective and efficient our methods were. largely in the time i spent in this role, i focussed on classroom related measures.

so it was all about numbers, measurements, check lists, spreadsheets, databases and suchlike.
my underlying hope and expectation from this process was for the teacher to be able to make use of this and help her reach out to her students.
it would eventually spiral outwards to cover the entire organisation.
i left well before the first spiral took off.

creating impact is latest fancy buzzword in business/corporate/NGO boardrooms.
from my own experiences and in my personal funda now, this buzzword has absolutely no place. i would go onto say that in case one is trying to 'impact the community/society' through their work - they are likely to fail; not only in making an impact, but also in doing a decent job of their core work (for e.g., education, health, etc).
here i do not cover government actions/policies and only apply this theorem to the non-government space.

i will re-engage the words of wendell berry here in his famous "in distrust of movements" as my support.

And so I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements to promote soil conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or sustainable agriculture or community health or the welfare of children. Worthy as these and other goals may be, they cannot be achieved alone. I am dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized, they are not comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough, they virtually predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects while leaving causes in place. Ultimately, I think, they are insincere; they propose that the trouble is caused by other people; they would like to change policy but not behaviour.

he goes onto lay a large part of the effort at the doorstep of each individual.

creating impact is directly associated with scaling and scaling is directly associated with creating movements.

kishore's comment on "milling around the corner", asks this (among many other things):
As the cause gains momentum, how do you then make it have more of an impact without losing the core beliefs and inspiration?

using the above passages as my detailed response, i will summarise my answer to this question - "it is not possible to expand the cause and make more impact without losing the core beliefs and inspiration."

or in a toned down version, "i am not at point return to create impact/change local behaviour/evangelise natural farming/organise, rather i am at pR to lead a simple and healthy and less exploitative life.