Impact and projects
I got a trickle of WhatsApp messages recently from somebody wanting to share what they were doing in the classroom in Zanzibar. It took me a while to place them. Then I realised that this was a university teacher-trainer who had participated in a pilot course to help home economics teachers promote sustainability in their learners that I had helped to develop, and tutored in 2018. She wanted to share the successes of her students, including that some of them had started sustainable catering businesses and she also included a short video of her students serving sustainable food to their parents at an event in their institution. I congratulated her on influencing two generations.
That project ended in 2019 when we were required to fill in a report on what we had done and the impact that we had had. As with all Erasmus Strategic Partnership projects, the percentage of points allocated to the issue of impact was 40% so we were aware throughout the project of its importance. But if the project has been truly impactful then concrete evidence, such as the example I opened with, is likely to manifest long after the report has been approved. This is an unavoidable tension in project work.
Having worked in European projects since about 2002, I have seen the growing significance attached to impact over the years and can understand the drive to get value for money as the impact issue has grown in importance. Yet it is difficult to achieve impact within the lifetime of a project when most of the period is spent in developing the end products.
We have just reached that point in my current project where the individual pieces of the puzzle that we have been busy developing, are coming together into a coherent whole. The overall picture was well captured by the graphic illustrator in our March meeting in Lithuania.
Our public event in Lithuania resulted in a letter of interest from the Lithuanian Red Cross which are interested in using the comprehensive package we have developed of:
We are also likely to get similar expressions of interest from one or two of the Italian organisations that we met during our meeting there in June. It is a slow and painstaking process and the question is whether we will have done enough by the time the funding ends in September and the report is written in November.
Ultimately the impact section of the final report can only establish that what the project has produced is of sufficient quality to make it of wider interest and that reasonable steps have been taken that are likely to result in positive impacts in the future.