Позитивные изменения. Том 2, № 3 (2022). Positive changes. Volume 2, Issue 3 (2022) - страница 22

Sofiya Shaginyan

Program manager, Reach for Change

The Reach for Change Foundation’s Incubator program is designed for projects at the early development stage. It is attended by 12 to 22 participants each year. We distinguish two groups of stakeholders in assessing social impact. The first group includes the impact projects, the second one is children and young people who are the beneficiaries of the impact projects[4].

For impact projects, the short-term social impact goal is to strengthen their organizational capacity, and the long-term goal is ensuring survivability and scalability.

For children and youth, short- and long-term goals for improvement of their lives are defined by what is known as the “Theory of Change” of impact projects. With this approach, the participants construct hypotheses for change in children’s lives, attach indicators and metrics, and devise data collection tools and plans.

The program participants provide data on the number of children and cases of changes in children’s lives three times a year, and social impact assessment data at the end of the first or in some cases second year of the project.

We track the development of the organizational capacity of impact projects using a tool called the Development Tracker.

The Tracker measures development in five areas:

• social impact;

• financial sustainability;

• leadership and team;

• social impact scaling;

• systemic changes.

Each sphere has its own subgoals. At the beginning of the year, the participants together with the program manager record the baseline status and define development targets for each subgoal. The status is updated throughout the year based on actual performance.

To track the development of organizational capacity, the Foundation also collects certain quantitative indicators from participants and analyzes their growth and multiplicity. Besides the number of children, these indicators include the number of staff and volunteers, financial performance, and project coverage.

The dynamics of project development, measured through quantitative indicators, vary from year to year, but based on data from previous years, we can say that the number of children receiving support traditionally at least doubles every year (for projects that were past the idea or prototype stage when joining the program).