Wednesday, 4 January 2012

Social Capital Measurement Framework

I heard from Lucy at the Angus Gillis Foundation in the Eastern Cape today. I visited AGF back in October whilst in South Africa for my WCMT fellowship and spent a really useful day with Lucy and colleague Kath, learning about their work with Positive Health Champions (read the post here).

Anyway...Lucy got in touch to let me know how they'd been using some of our work and thinking around demonstrating social capital as part of their evaluation planning and to do some thinking around how they capture their own impact as an organisation. Lucy said:

"We started by using the first three layers of the framework to identify examples and illustrative anecdotes in our own work. Then we discussed the different categories to see how relevant they are for the work that we do and whether we would make any amendments or additions. It was SUCH a useful tool and proved a great starting point around which to frame our thinking. It also turns out that the different dimensions of social capital that you have identified make a lot of sense in our own programme. We’re going to take it forward by using a very slightly adapted framework to help us identify, capture and communicate our impact and to formalise our M&E systems."

 Lucy sent some great pictures of the process too:




And...as a reminder, here's the framework I shared with them so you can see the links.

Great to know the framework has been useful and that my visit was mutually beneficial in so many ways!