Nor myself but our Children"s Centre.
Which means I have spent a lot of the last week drowning in stats and data
How many families from our reach area attend our centre.
How many of those families are targeted families.
How many of the children of the targeted families go to a nursery, a health visitor, eat healthily, weigh the right amount…….the questions are endless, the statistics screwy and our ability to change the world, limited.
But the worst part of all is when it comes to measuring impact.
How can we show that, by doing what we do, we can truly make a difference.
How has your centre changed lives for the better.
And that's where stats and data fall apart.
You can get statistics to prove almost anything.
You can turn them into graphs or charts or percentages.
You can even get them to predict what might happen in the future..but you can't get them to tell you what that future holds.
Impact doesn't fit into a tickable box because impact is about something immeasurable. It's about changing an attitude, altering an aspiration, planting a dream.
And how do you measure that?
How do you quantify what might happen tomorrow or in a week or in a decade as the result of something you have done today?
And the more time I try to spend analysing data, the more I find myself daydreaming.
Wondering what it would be like to impact measure ourselves.
To assess the difference we have or haven't made.
As it happens, I have been thinking about the past a lot lately. A few weeks ago I met up with 3 long-ago friends in Dusseldorf, Germany. We have known each other since we all met on the second floor of C block at university in Liverpool more than two decades ago. Over the years we have fallen in and out of touch and our lives have travelled in very different directs. But somehow across oceans and countries and years, we have always found each other again. Because there was something immeasurably special about that year when we lived on the same floor and the next, when we shared a student house ( so cold that we had to burn most of the furniture to keep warm! )
It's hard to say what it was.
Perhaps it is because student days are the only time in your life when you spend every waking hour with your friends and friendships that can survive drunken nights, hungover mornings, love, heart-ache, exam pressure, shared cooking and the contentious splitting of electricity bills- can survive anything .
Perhaps it is because, living so far from home, we had to grow up and become independent. And to do that we were, for a time, dependent on each other.
We sat round the psychologically warming fake fire in the hotel, drinking champagne from ice cube filled pint glasses discussing Jude Law and whether or not he had ever been in our garden, reading glasses, Christmas markets, the situation in the Lebanon and what to have for dinner.
And as we got out of the lift, chatting and laughing and made our way back to our rooms, someone from the lift called after us:
" Four sisters from the fourth floor."
And I thought: from the 2nd floor of C Block to the 4th floor of a hotel. We have definitely gone up in the world!
And the truth is, that we have all gone up in the world and perhaps none of us would be where we are today if we hadn't met each other.
But then again, perhaps we would.
And that's the trouble with measuring impact.
It is not finite or definite.
It is the possibility that because you met someone, their lives are now different.
All that I know for certain is that all these years on with all that has happened my life is richer and slightly crazier for knowing them.But all these years on, for me at least, it is easy to measure the impact my 3 friends from the fourth floor have had: my life is richer and a little bit crazier for knowing them.
Fit that into a tick box if you can!
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| Four friends from the fourth floor |
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