What it means

Impact means creating a positive or negative change in someone's life or the environment. The opposite is impotence, meaning there is activity but no resulting change from that activity. For example, if you want to start a fire to warm your food. There are internal factors (dryness of the firewood), external inputs (matches) and a supportive context (three stones to hold the pot). Without any one of these resources, and without you striking the match, you do not achieve the impact desired.

Meaningful impact is when people find the change important, useful, and relevant. So if you make a fire in a place that already has an electric stove, you have made a change, yes, but it is meaningless to that household. We want meaningful impact!

In a program, this looks like designing learning experiences which result in some meaningful change in participants lives or environment. For example, you might want to solve the problem of students having poor critical thinking skills by designing a complex puzzle for them to solve. If you want to make that impact meaningful, you might choose a puzzle related to their math lessons. Or even turn it into a math competition in the school!