Aiming for Impact? Identify Your Stakeholders Early and Often.

When you work in social impact, the core of your scope of work seems straightforward: how can you create social change that positively benefits the community?

Well, it seems straightforward. Within the first few days on the ground in Bhubaneswar, India, my Global Social Impact Practicum class and I discovered how hard it is to pin down the idea of “social change.” As we learned about waste management and slum development, we quickly learned that everyone has a slightly different idea about what constitutes positive social change and the definition of community. Our core problem of waste management in Odisha refracted differently through each stakeholders’ lens.

Our project for Tata Trusts on urban waste management solutions involves three different stakeholders. In drafting and revising our scope, each day we altered our project mission depending on who we spoke to that day. Here are our main stakeholders and their influence on our scope of work:

1. Local government officials. Even individuals in the same office may have different expectations about social change. While in Bhubaneswar, we met with the mayor, as well as the city’s administrative officer, an appointed official who controls the budget. The mayor spoke in broad and enthusiastic terms about the University of Chicago’s role in solving the city’s waste problems. On the other hand, the administrator shared very specific ideas about   integrating informal waste pickers into the formal waste management system. These two stakeholders left us with one broad scope and one narrow scope (as well as several newspaper articles excitedly announcing our involvement in Bhubaneswar waste management).
   
   

2. Community members. We visited four slums, each of which had its own personality. In one slum—which had toilets, permanent concrete infrastructure, and clean water—the women told us with a laugh that if they had an extra day’s salary, they would purchase sarees and bangles. At another slum—which had temporary tarp infrastructure, no toilets, and was flanked by a pile of waste—the community matriarch told us that what the community needed most was a drain, so that the slum would not flood during the monsoon months. Neither slum pointed to waste management specifically as their main concern. Imagine our surprise that these stakeholders left us with a scope that did not involve waste management!
   
   

3. Philanthropic Organizations. Our two main contacts at Tata Trusts gave us specific criteria of success: the waste management intervention should leverage free time of women, technology, and social capital; it also must improve the livelihood of people in the slums and be scalable to other slums in India. But building drains, as one of the women we met requested? Or including rag pickers in our project, as the Bhubaneshwar administrator suggested? We were on our own to figure out if and how these interventions would fit into the scope of social change.