Hello, hope you are enjoying beautiful spring whenever you are on the globe!
Please enjoy our spring e-newsletter for stories about our Impact Report, announcement of change of our organization name from World in Asia to World in Tohoku, and membership recruitment.
（日本語の文章はこの記事の下に記載しています）
Best wishes,
Mio Yamamoto
Managing Director, World in Tohoku (WIT) (Former World in Asia)
■□ Index □■
1. From World in Asia to World in Tohoku
2. Impact Report – Worldness Effect
3. We are looking for members! (WIT Friend, Ambassador, Partner, and Fellow)
■□ 1. From World in Asia to World in Tohoku □■
WIA started in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Tohoku (northeastern) region of Japan on March 11th, 2011. After three years of working with nine social entrepreneurs in Tohoku, we decided to change our organization name to WIT (World in Tohoku).
WIT, led by Mio Yamamoto, further focuses on supporting social entrepreneurs in Tohoku, and Asia-related programs span out as WIA Lab, which is led by Tetsuo Kato.
Social innovation emerged from Tohoku is creating more open and resilient civil society. WIT aims to accelerate such social change and give back to the other parts of the world with good practices and innovative models. (Please see this post as well.)
■□ 2. Impact Report – Worldness Effect □■
We are happy to share our recently published Impact Report for 2012-2013 with you. Please take a look and download the report here. We would love to hear your comments!
Here are three points from the report. First, why we do what we do. Although our organization was founded in the wake of the disaster, a transformative experience that led me to this work goes back to my primary school days. Please take look at the story in page 2-3, and three stories illustrating the world that WIT dreams in pages 5, 12, and 15.
Next, what impact are our investees bringing to the society. Are the investees making impact on beneficiaries as they originally aimed? Are they continuously exploring greater efficiency in their activities while improving or maintaining the quality of their services?
WIT uses the number of beneficiaries as a common indicator among all our investees; however, specific change that each investee wants to create varies by organization. We cannot track the long-term and sustainable social change immediately. Impact on the beneficiaries is not the result of a single intervention by one organization, but collective result of many complex factors.
Measuring impact is hard, but WIT thinks it crucial to continuously track inputs (what resources used), impact model (how the social entrepreneur is generating impact), outputs, and impact (attributional outcome), both quantitatively and qualitatively. Thus WIT set customized indicators for each of our investees, and tried to compare with national or other statistics if available. Please see pages 6 to 18 of the report for details.
We found through the measurement process that there is not enough comparable data available out there for inter-temporal comparison and comparison of different interventions. WIT, together with our investees, continues our discussion on how we can have more standardized data across organizations and at the public level as well as how each investee can better track and communicate their impact.
Lastly, how do we contribute to the social change. WIT believes that cross-sector collaboration accelerates and broadens social change, as we see in the recent popularity in Collective Impact. Thus we track how many partnerships and how much funding that WIT coordinated for our investees. Please see pages 1, 2 (Worldness Effect), 17, and 18.
■□ 3. We are looking for members! □■
We are looking for members who join and support our work! Our work is financially supported by generous organizations and individuals like Give2Asia, JCIE, the Japan Society in New York, and others.
Please join us as WIT Friend with $10 of monthly contribution, and WIT Ambassador with $30 of monthly contribution. We invite WIT Ambassadors and Friends to our events for free (Ambassadors) or at a discounted price (Friends). Most events will be in Tokyo and Tohoku region of Japan and online, but we are open to have events in NYC, Boston, and other areas in the US if we have many Ambassadors and Friends.
We are also looking for WIT Partners who provide management support to our investees. Please see page 20 of our Impact Report for details.
Thank you very much!
Mio Yamamoto, Managing Director, WIT (World in Tohoku)