What Counts as Social Change?

MASTERCLASS  

What Counts as Social Change?

As a social entrepreneur, you care deeply about making a difference. You see a need, you build something to meet it and you change lives through your work. Yet even with the best intentions, social change can quietly lose its depth when the focus stays on activity and delivery rather than the wider shifts your work exists to influence.

Social change is about more than improving individual lives. It is about shifting the cultural and social patterns that hold challenges in place, the values, structures and stories that shape how society functions. Homelessness, for example, is not just about a lack of housing. It is connected to a system that treats housing as a financial product rather than a human right. The same is true across sectors, as services respond to need while the deeper conditions that create that need often remain unchallenged.

When you begin to see those patterns your work takes on new meaning. You can locate what you do within a much wider social change story, one that connects your activity to longer-term cultural and systemic influence.

This masterclass offers space to pause and reflect on what social change really means. Together we will explore how cultural, structural and systemic forces shape the challenges you are working to address and how to recognise where your work sits within that wider landscape. You will leave with a deeper understanding of the difference between service delivery and social change and with language and tools to describe your impact in ways that feel clear, grounded and connected to the larger change your organisation exists to advance.

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This session is the first in a two-part series designed to help you articulate your wider social impact. It will be followed by a three-hour workshop on Wednesday 3rd December, held on Zoom, to go deeper into writing your Case for Change and exploring an introduction to Theory of Change.