As a social enterprise, positive social impact is embedded into our purpose. Our mission is to ensure that people and organisations have the knowledge, access and power they need to drive positive change in the places they choose and the issues that affect them.
As an organisation founded to provide services to help other organisations understand, deepen and measure their social impact, we’ve had to look hard at how we understand and measure our own social impact, whilst concurrently being unequivocally committed to supporting our partners achieve their own ambitions.
In our recent approach to change, we adopted a systems innovation perspective. We identified the areas where we have control and influence across all our work, which led us to focus on three key drivers: mindset shifts, redistribution, and participation. These three drivers play a crucial role in facilitating knowledge access and empowerment, which aligns closely with our mission and values.
THEORY OF CHANGE
Our theory of change illustrates our emerging thinking about how we and the communities that we partner with re-imagine a fair society.
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We have chosen not to portray this as a traditional, linear theory of change because as we began to think about the work we do and the changes we hoped to see in the world, we realised that re-imagining a fair society is not linear and does not always have predictable outcomes. We have chosen to portray our theory of change as an illustration rather than a diagram to make sure that it is human and relatable and that it feels like an ongoing work in progress and an ongoing conversation, rather than something fixed and finished.
We recognise that the changes that we want to see in the world are interconnected and systemic, and that they therefore need interconnected solutions. The cogs in the middle of the diagram illustrate our emerging thoughts on what is needed to make lasting change so that communities can thrive. The three interlocking bases of this change are:
REDISTRIBUTION of assets, power and resources
PARTICIPATION of communities and individuals in the decisions that affect their lives
MINDSETS changes in mindset at all levels to reflect different ways of living and being together
We have found that projects might start by exploring one of these areas in more depth, but that over time, partners and communities recognise that they are interconnected and that changes in one lead to changes in the others.
The cogs do not move on their own – they are pushed by people, working individually and together. It was important for us to illustrate the human aspect of this work – systems are made up of people and can be changed by people.
We also recognise that with big aspirations come big questions – the questions in the minds of the people pushing the cogs are some of the ones that have come up in our work recently. We want to continue to explore these areas with communities and partners.
The images surrounding the cogs illustrate some (though definitely not all) of the actions or outcomes that might be necessary to achieve systemic change in each of the three areas of redistribution, participation and mindsets. These illustrate the priorities that TSIP is either already working on or aspires to work on over the coming years.
This work is rooted in our values and approaches, which form the frame of the image. If our goal is to reimagine society, then how we work matters as much as what we do – so it was vital for us to have our values and approaches in the image.