Impact Canvas DEVeLOPED 2014-2020
The Impact Canvas was first roughly drawn on paper in 2014, and since then has been iterated upon, used, reworked, designed and redesigned with input from many individuals, teams and organisations. The Impact Canvas was motivated originally by Lifehackhq.co - a youth mental health social lab where we worked closely with teams of young people trying to make changes in their communities, in their lives, and in the systems which affect their wellbeing. We coached and facilitated programs for hundreds of young people, and discovered patterns in their needs: group process guidance, problem definition, strengths validation etc. Additionally, cofounding Zero Carbon Challenge, an accelerator program for climate change mitigating start ups, we felt the curriculum was stocked up with start up materials, but lacked an equivalent set of materials for impact strategy. Finally, during the founding and establishment of Generation Zero, the work put into theory of change development displayed the benefits of investing in organisation-wide alignment on strategic approach to enhance impact. As we grew from 7 people to 200, and then to 15,000+ our impact logic made it possible to communicate what we were not doing and that helped to focus the mobilisation, achieving many outcomes including getting the Zero Carbon Bill into legislation in New Zealand.
SPECIAL Thanks to:
Enspiral Foundation for donating $2000NZD towards costs of production
Sam Rye for cocreating and motivation
Peter Robinson for copy editing
Aaron Brodeur from Terran Collective for designing the Canvas image
All the users and iteration partners
About the Author:
Chelsea Matilda Robinson has a background in complex problem solving with a systems change approach. She has worked on climate policy, suicide reduction, democratic process, commons management frameworks, open source technologies and more.
With a firm belief that the “how” is as important as the “what”, a lot of her work centres on the ways we work together, talk, listen and connect. Academically, her background is earth science and policy, with research on future practices for policy making, collaborative governance, and meaningful inclusion of indigenous peoples in otherwise neocolonial resource management regimes.
Recent research identifying success factors for funding systems change: https://www.weave.is/
Currently Chief Operating Officer at the Open Lunar Foundation.
resources featuring impact canvas
Better Work Together
A book project by the Enspiral Foundation collectively written by 10+ authors. The Impact Canvas is featured in a chapter called “Finding what matters”.
Writing on Medium
“Will it make a difference?”
”Don’t assume the first problem you think of is the real nature of the problem, otherwise you’ll pour energy into making change, and get no change.”