PHASE 3

Close-up of the “Impact” phase in the framework diagram, showing student-led action, measurable outcomes, reflection, and evidence of social impact in community-based learning.

Q: How am I taking meaningful and sustainable action to address the issue I care about?

The IMPACT phase of our Empathy to Impact framework emphasizes not only what students create or do (outputs), but also the meaningful results of their actions (outcomes), and the deeper, sustained shifts they contribute to in communities or systems (impact). This phase is about moving from ideas to real-world application—where learners evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts and reflect on how their actions contribute to long-term well-being, justice, and sustainability. The following steps are foundational for effective community engagement.

IMPACT Steps:

  • Step 1 - Identify what type of action students will engage in.

    As an educator team or with your students, identify which type of action is linked to your summative assessment or learning goals and identify a type of action that provides opportunities for students to transfer their knowledge into a real-world context.

    Going further: Define clear intended outcomes and impact goals
    Guide students to identify both short-term outcomes (what will change as a result of their action) and long-term impact goals (how this might create deeper, lasting change). Use backward design and essential questions that tie outputs to real-world transformation.

  • Step 2 - Identify who you will collaborate with to take action.

    Conduct a community assets audit, create a vetted community partner list or explore an existing school-wide list, or brainstorm possible community assets you could collaborate with to design a real-world opportunity to engage in action or service. Ensure that this reciprocal action meets your learning outcomes and transfer goals, while also ensuring a mutually beneficial collaboration with the partner.

  • Step 3 - Define and provide opportunities for action, service, and engagement

    As a teacher team, you might identify a larger summative service or action that you are guiding students towards, you may provide a menu of possible actions that students can take or you may follow student inquiry and use the resources to encourage students to engage effectively.

    Going further: Integrate Cycles of Action and Reflection:
    Structure time for learners to engage in action (e.g., advocacy, service, design, or campaigns) and critically reflect on the effectiveness, ethics, and sustainability of their work. Reflection can include stakeholder feedback and self-assessment aligned with impact goals.

  • Plan for Ongoing Empowerment and Transfer:
    Design opportunities for students to extend their impact beyond the classroom—through community partnerships, public exhibitions, or iterative projects that can evolve. Emphasize transferability: how the knowledge, skills, and mindsets developed can be applied to future contexts and challenges, even by future collaborators or community partners.

What type of action will you engage in?
Choose the type(s) of action students might engage in:

 
 
 
 

Conduct a Community Assets Audit:
Explore how students might interact with community partners

Determine how students will have an impact.

Consider long-term reciprocal relationships

Qualities of Reciprocal Relationship

•Conditions of equality
•Ongoing interactions and longer duration of service
•Continuity of relationships with the partner organization
•Ability to communicate effectively
•Based on needs
•Mutual benefit
•May begin with understanding and relationship-building before moving to action
•Use of evidence to continuously reflect and improve over time
•Capacity building on-site

Considerations for Co-Curricular or Experiential Learning Circumstances

  • When linking to curriculum, it is important that the action and community partner align with the assessment, learning outputs, or targets of the experience.

  • When working with student clubs, student leadership groups, after-school activities, or advisory programs, you have more flexibility, so we encourage you to use community asset audits and action menus with your student leaders in discussions within your advisory groups or extracurricular sessions early in the process, so students develop a broader understanding of how they can take action. This also helps move them away from traditional approaches such as bake sales, charity drives, fundraisers, and donations.

  • In experiential learning contexts, it is important to consider both the geographical location and the community partner you might be collaborating with for an experience. We encourage moving away from potentially harmful or short-term actions, such as a one-hour visit to an orphanage.

  • When planning experiential learning opportunities, consider what constitutes deep action, reflect on the qualities of reciprocal interactions, and identify a community partner to collaborate with prior to the experience to increase depth and ensure meaningful impact.

Other helpful resources:

School as a Sustainability Living Lab

In collaboration, students, educators, and the greater school community can investigate and design how to set sustainability targets, promote sustainable attitudes and behaviors, and shape practices for greater sustainability, and how to collect evidence in order to actively monitor progress with a deep link to curriculum or program goals.

By using the school community and building as a sustainability lab, learners become empowered community members who apply global thinking to local and personal action. These micro-local actions make applied learning and authentic sustainable impact visible on a daily basis within the functions and operations of the school and behaviors of the campus community.

Related resources:

Get Transition started in your street, community, town, school or organisation

Transition is a movement that has been growing since 2005. It is about communities stepping up to address the big challenges they face by starting local. By coming together, they are able to create solutions together. They seek to nurture a caring culture, one focused on connection with self, others and nature. They are reclaiming the economy, sparking entrepreneurship, reimagining work, reskilling themselves and weaving webs of connection and support. Courageous conversations are being had; extraordinary change is unfolding.

Transition is deeply ambitious. It wants to change the way the places we live feed themselves, house themselves, employ themselves, power themselves.

That’s a big ask, and it will take time, determination, and togetherness. But what’s vital to remember is that how you do your projects matters as much, if not more, than what the projects are. What we are doing here is not just creating projects that reimagine and rebuild the world.

What is just as important is that the way we work, the organisational cultures we create, should also model the kind of world we want to create. There’s no use trying to create a new, healthier and more resilient culture if we end up replicating the unhealthy ways of relating and working that underpin our current culture.

Related resources:

Compassion and Wisdom

True wisdom is to directly see and understand for ourselves. At this level, wisdom involves to keep an open mind rather than being closed-minded, listening to other points of view rather than being bigoted; to carefully examine facts that contradict our beliefs, rather than burying our heads in the sand; to be objective rather than prejudiced and partisan; to take time about forming our opinions and beliefs rather than just accepting the first or most emotional thing that is offered to us; and to always be ready to change our beliefs when facts that contradict them are presented to us.

Just as wisdom relates to the intellectual side of our nature, compassion covers the emotional or feeling side of our nature. Like wisdom, compassion is a uniquely human quality. Compassion is made up of two words, 'co' meaning together and 'passion' meaning a strong feeling. And this is what compassion is. When we see someone in distress and we feel their pain as if it were our own, and strive to eliminate or lessen their pain, then this is compassion.

Related resources:

Futures Media

Futures Media provides an open space for students everywhere to explore and produce informed media for the critical and compassionate exchange of ideas.

Through nearly twenty student-centered media channels, learners explore and engage with issues, ethics, and diverse perspectives alongside humane storytelling, technology integration, journalism, civil discourse and information literacy.

In collaboration with partner schools, classrooms, or student journalists, we aim to build student-led media labs grounded in the Empathy to Impact design system: Care, Aware, Able, Impact.

ICFM learners, producers, and artists interpret global media while also working to publish credible information, capture underrepresented stories and voices, amplify imagination, and take systematic action for sustainable development and equity.

Related resources:

Further Reflection:
How has my action impacted my community and me?

“IMPACT” in action

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