Hi, we’re Sahiti Bhaskara, Senior Evaluation Consultant, and Nina Sabarre, CEO, from Intention 2 Impact (I2I), a social impact consultancy known for measuring and communicating impact for foundations, nonprofits, and impact investors.

ICYMI, this week our team is taking over AEA 365 to explore what it means to treat impact as a verb instead of a noun. Today: how to build a measurement system that tracks towards a BIG quantitative metric, while being expansive enough to hold nuance. 

Decolonizing Wealth Project (DWP)’s Moonshot goal is to unlock $1 trillion in reparative giving over 10 years. Reparative philanthropy is the intentional redistribution of resources that directly acknowledges the extractive origins of institutional or family wealth. It treats wealth as “medicine” designed to heal past harms and foster collective wellbeing rather than protecting, growing, and hoarding it.

Our job as their MEL partners was to build a measurement system that meaningfully tracks towards $1 trillion, and helps DWP understand how its different strategies (i.e., grantmaking, sector transformation, and storytelling & culture) contribute towards it.

We have to admit… as systems-thinking, mixed-methods evaluators, tracking dollars first made us pause. We worried that an impact measurement system that boils everything down to a quantitative number might oversimplify the work. 

But the thing about the Moonshot is it is not just a number, it is a movement. When DWP announced their goal, they knew $1T could not be achieved by a single organization, strategy, or sector. An audacious goal like that requires all-hands-on-deck, systems transformation. 

So the measurement system needed to do two things at once:

• Systematically track dollars moved from DWP, individuals, and institutions
• AND capture how systems change (e.g., narrative and culture change, policies, practices) also contribute towards the Moonshot in a measurable way.

We had to get clear on what is direct: a grant to a community-led fund or a donor who redirects a portfolio after moving through DWP’s Reparative Philanthropy™ Framework. And what is indirect: a foundation that shifts its practices after witnessing reparative giving in action or a wealth advisor whose relationship to money starts to change. This requires a clear Theory of Change that allows us to estimate how indirect changes contribute to direct outcomes. It isn’t easy (we’re still in the messy middle), but we realized that publicly tracking towards $1T is part of the strategy to mobilize people to join the movement. 

In a world where there are actual trillionaires… we need money as medicine more than ever. And when impact measurement is treated like a verb instead of a noun, it can be an active part of a strategy. 

Rad Resource: Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth — the 2018 book behind DWP’s vision and introduction to the 7 Steps to Healing, which shape DWP’s Reparative Philanthropy Framework and their bespoke offerings for organizations and individuals. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why reparative giving demands a fundamentally different relationship to money, healing, and power. You may remember him from AEA’s keynote in 2022!

Hot Tip: Let the theory set the terms before the tracker does.

When a goal is this ambitious, the pull is toward what’s easiest to count. Resist it! The framework won’t be perfect, but it needs to be expansive enough to see the change you’re actually trying to make, not just the change that already fits neatly into a column. Build for the whole theory, not just the measurable tip of it.

At the end of the day, $1T is not ‘impact’ — the real impact is in the sector transformation it took to get there and will sustain it beyond.