This week, Dr Ruth Knight from the ACPNS shared her thoughts about accountability, measuring outcomes, and asking the right questions with Tom Allen from Impact Boom. Each week Tom asks a different community leader to share their ideas, initiatives, insights and inspiration for how we can create positive social impact in our own communities, and then he shares these insights with Impact Boom’s global community.
In this interview Ruth highlights there has been much change over the last twenty years in the nonprofit sector, with evidence of impact becoming increasingly important to their supporters. This has changed the playing field for nonprofits and social enterprises, who must now place greater emphasis on justifying that they truly are making positive impacts in their communities.
Ruth and the ACPNS are playing a big role in helping social enterprises to provide this information to interested parties. As she states, ACPNS uses education to work with sector leaders to build their capacity and capability within the sector; as well as research to examine trends and predict what will be needed to help the sector thrive and flourish as we move into the future. Ruth herself, being a social enterprise lecturer and researcher encourages social entrepreneurs to ask the right questions to ensure that the right solutions to social problems are reached.
