Welcome to Bright Impact CIC
What’s Bright Impact all about?
All too often evaluation feels like a burden or an unhelpful add-on.
It’s often something people put off, or just do if they have to. People often associate ‘doing it’ with sending out questionnaires or feedback forms.
But it doesn’t have to be this way!
Bright Impact CIC is on a mission to cultivate creativity and joy in evaluative work. We want to help organisations do things differently, celebrating diverse ways of knowing, being and doing in the process.
As evaluators, it’s easy to caught up with theories, frameworks, methods and reports.
We believe that designing evaluations should start and end with the people involved at the centre. It should be rooted in curiosity and a commitment to making the world a better place, not extracting data and writing reports.
About Creative Methods
Sometimes using traditional research and evaluation methods, like surveys or interviews, feels like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. They just don’t work.
There can be lots of different reasons for this. For example they might feel tedious and extractive, leading to disengagement or lack of interest. Then there are practical issues like literacy challenges and language barriers. Sometimes traditional methods just aren’t appropriate.
Creative research methods, as an alternative, can be more inclusive, as they provide alternative ways for individuals with diverse backgrounds, abilities, and communication styles to participate. People who may feel uncomfortable or marginalised in traditional research and evaluation settings may find creative methods more accessible and empowering.
So we’re on a mission to support organisations to use more creative methods as a way to understand their impact, demonstrate it and help centre voices of the people that matter most.
About Our Social Impact
We’re a creative research social enterprise creating opportunities for young people to gain research and evaluation experience.
We do this in 2 main ways:
#1 We work on projects that involve young people and looking for opportunities for them to gain experience, for example:
Offering peer or community researcher training
Running youth panels to centre young people’s voices and experiences
Doing pro-bono work to help young people develop research knowledge, skills and experience
See an example of the videos we helped young people create as part of an
Evaluation of Together for Children’s Breathing Space project.
#2 We also reinvest our profits to create opportunities for young people to get real world experience, including:
Paying young people to co-facilitate Brunch Clubs and other events
Offering free places for young people underrepresented in research on our courses and events
Offering careers sessions through schools, colleges and other education providers
Offering work experience
We’re also funding some research at the moment to inform a future support offer, potentially targeted at community researchers. We aren’t exactly sure what this looks like yet - that’s why we’re running the listening sessions. But we’re committed to creating opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds who are interested in research careers to learn and progress.
How to get involved: There’s a brief registration form to fill in -https://lnkd.in/e-Peng9a
Please express your interest by Friday 8th May.
Outside of work, you’re likely to find Jami wandering around in the great outdoors, curled up reading a book somewhere, or putting the world to rights over coffee (or maybe wine).
About Jami -
Bright Impact Founder
Although Jami has lived and worked in various parts of the world (including Leeds, London, Edinburgh, and Kampala - Uganda), she recently moved back to the North East and set up Bright Impact CIC.
Jami started her career 20 years ago working for a small charity in Uganda, managing a range of community-based environmental projects. Since then, she has completed a PhD exploring the impacts of climate change on agriculture and worked on the evaluation of various UK-aid funded projects across Sub-Saharan Africa. After that, she spent 5 years at UnLtd - The Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs, before becoming a freelance Impact & Evaluation Practitioner in 2021.
Her current work mainly focuses on supporting charities and social enterprises to use data and evidence as a force for good. Jami's ADHD and dyslexia bring a unique perspective to her work, and she is always looking for fun and creative ways to evidence impact.
She recently stepped down as the co-chair of the Charity Evaluation Working Group (ChEW), one of the founding organisations of the Equitable Evaluation Collective. Jami is passionate about challenging traditional power dynamics in evaluation and championing approaches that promote equity.
