Our Impact team was delighted to offer training to our community partners, with a workshop held at The Paddock on ‘Stories of Most Significant Change’. Used as an approach for learning and evaluation, this is part of a broader capacity development process through which the Give Where You Live Foundation will collect stories from community partners, train them in the approach, and facilitate analysis of the stories at an Impact Forum in May 2025 for partners and other stakeholders.
Most Significant Change (MSC) involves collecting meaningful stories from those impacted by the work/the grant and analysing them collaboratively. This approach supports learning and evaluation, offering insights into individual impacts and broader changes or learnings within a project or organisation.
Stories are powerful because they are universal, serve as a natural sense-making tool, and provide a rich, contextual understanding of what is happening and why. They can help to uncover deeper and potentially unexpected program impacts and learnings to improve the program.
The Foundation is using this evaluation method both as a pilot to capture, share and learn from our community partner grantees about the impact of the grants and to build the capacity of community partners to use this approach within their own organisation or project.
Our community partners learned that MSC involves both collecting and analysing stories. We also explored how they could apply MSC in their own projects or organisations, delving into the specifics of story collection and analysis.
Most Significant Change (MSC) was developed by Jess Dart and Rick Davies in the 1990s after they found traditional evaluation methods ineffective for assessing projects with diverse activities. Today, their MSC approach and guide is used globally. The Give Where You Live Foundation would like to acknowledge the support of Jess Dart from Clear Horizon Consulting who initially provided this training to staff and some community partners in 2018 and has supported us to further develop Most Significant Change in our evaluation practice across the organisation.