The era when 'feels good' no longer funds anything — a map for this series on social impact

There was a time when a community garden or a food-support group could apply for a grant by simply explaining its purpose — preventing isolation, cutting food waste, giving children a place to belong — and that was enough, because the people reviewing the application did not doubt the goodness of the activity. Today, many funders ask from the first page of the application how the effect will be measured, what method will be used, and whether last year's results can be shown in numbers. The fact that 66 per cent of investors in GIIN's 2020 survey named 'impact washing' as the biggest obstacle is not a quirk of a few conscientious foundations; it shows the suspicion has spread across funders as a whole.

This series assumes two earlier columns: Urban Farming and Community and Care farming and horticultural therapy, which unpacked, through social science and physiology, why a garden connects people and why it heals body and mind. None of that is repeated here. What this series takes up is the part that remains unsolved even once you know the benefit is real: how do you prove it? What does the SROI ratio actually measure, and what does it miss? Who invented the phrase 'impact investing,' and when? What does a 'no results, no payment' contract actually do to an organisation on the ground? How does Japan's dormant-deposit money reach community gardens? Is there any substance to the claim that evaluation itself exhausts the organisations doing it? And is there something wrong with trying to measure what resists measurement in the first place? Seven days, in that order.

'Evidence-based' began as a phrase from medicine: an insurer cannot keep paying for a treatment nobody has shown works. The same logic spread to public health and international aid, and now reaches welfare, education and community-activity grants. Behind it lies a simple fact — money is finite and the number of applicants keeps rising, so a funder naturally wants to give the same amount to whichever activity does more good. The trouble is that the method for measuring 'more good' is still being worked out. Day two takes up that methodology itself: what SROI and logic models actually do, and why a randomised controlled trial cannot simply be dropped into a welfare programme the way it can into a drug trial.

The other force behind the shift is that funders themselves have diversified. Nonprofit funding used to mean government subsidy and charitable donation, almost exclusively. Now it also includes 'impact investors' who want both a financial return and a social one, and 'outcome-based contracts' that pay according to results achieved. These newer funders operate on the logic of investment rather than charity, and once you are investing, demanding a quantified return — in this case a social one — follows naturally. Day three traces when the idea of 'impact investing' itself was born; day four follows how such contracts actually operate in practice.