Week Five: Solutions and Impact Evaluation

     To be honest I was not super thrilled with the content of this weeks lesson. This isn't because the information isn't important. I personally am not a very... analytical person, and this week was all about being able to look at and analyze businesses measurements, determining which measurements are important, figuring out what the measurements mean and how you can improve your business process based off you analysis.  

    However I did really enjoy looking up and analyzing a program that relates to illiteracy in the US. I picked Dolly Parton's foundation called Imagination Library. Something that I noticed that the statistics that were available to the public online were all output focused. How many books they had given out, how much they had grown year over year, how many countries they provided books to. While these aren't bad things to measure, I think that it doesn't capture the potential impact that this program has on children. Do children who participate in this program end up having higher literacy rates? If a family has a child that is in this program are they most likely to actively read with their child? Of course these are difficult questions to answer, but those are the kind of questions that I think show impact over output.


    I did not care for the Starfish Hurling article we had to read this week. Mostly because the original point of the story is that every individual matters in their own way, and the Starfish Hurling article takes it too literally. That being said, I think it did demonstrate how you need to genuinely do research and ask questions about the community you want to help if you want to start a socially focused business. It does make a point that in order to actually make a positive impact you have to do the research behind it, just doing random acts of kindness is great, but creating lasting change and impact is not random. 

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