Social Impact?
A love of food has continued to be a primary focus of my life. Saturdays are for fresh food markets, cooking, eating and sharing food with people. It is basically energy, or even entropy, or stored energy, depending on the level of nerd we want to explore. The body needs food to create glucose for it to burn while your attention is busy with your world either in the physical or digital. Obviously, it is way more complex as our bodies require a multitude of nutrients from different sources for the complex biological systems to function — let alone have optimum health.
What is impact?
Once I started to change my own habits in my 20s, I noticed how this also impacted the people around me. I stopped consuming drinks with sugar in them, slowly removed meat and ate more plants. This caused those around me to think about their food and try different things, leading to my family all getting into green smoothies at one time. However, in our culture as a whole, the health perils of obesity were downplayed and food was simplified to transactions of kilojoules. Energy in, energy out. Humans use energy to work and this is how we have continued to impact the world around us. This valuation of work over health is well known across many cultures.
I noticed my own impacts on the social systems around me and that, at the same time, the conditions of my environment impacted me at all times. This thinking continues to drive my work today. However, now I would say the way I think is as a systems scientist who takes on many different roles in the world. As the CEO/Founder at Bios, we are prepared to take on the ambitious challenge to integrate food and energy systems in your buildings for communities to create the conditions for health.
There are many ways to approach this challenge and we chose to target buildings to improve resource waste/use, integrate indoor vertical farming and IoT. What we are doing differently to the industry is to focus on demonstrating the direct community value, through improving the quality of physical work environments, optimizing resources for clean food production and creating a community owned business. This is already having some impact on the local community as we learn more about their food, health and environmental awareness.
So what is social impact?
Social Impact is a term alive in the world. Here I propose that the current global calamity has had a tremendous impact on the experience of society in 2021. The societal experience and a large part of human behaviour has been moved to transactions online. These new online conditions may promote climate change, epidemics, identity wars, satellites, falling rockets and echo chambers for better click rates. At the same time, many in this digital world are discussing how and what society should consider normal in the future. These norms have physical world impacts on the health of earth and humans. Is this Social Impact?
This Impact (verb) deserves attention now, as it is happening, in order to understand what is delivering direct value to community and society health. So lets start with a definition, search for Social Impact in the Cambridge Dictionary. I did today 13th of May 2021, but there is no definition.
Here we need a bit of history of the words Social and Impact. Thanks Etymolgyonline.com.
When considering the origins of Social as a noun is very much anchored in the description of gatherings of people together or groups of friends. The idea of a social event in the past makes one think about a party or community hall meeting were everyone is together to explore the events purpose. This had impact as each person at the event collided with others during the social event, before and after, either online or offline.
We are creating impact with every action we take. This is why I love food: Its impact is obvious, immediate and measurable. Interactions, creativity and engagement all come to life around the table. Now, in 2021, there is nothing better than taking the chance one time a month to work together with our Bios team and share a homemade meal. Our society was built on people gathering to advance their communities. Sometimes there are collisions, but somehow a friendly compassionate environment emerged to find solutions.
Social Impact is intrinsically linked with humans in society, their health and the efficiency of their infrastructure. So why can’t we find data to measure it and share results with the community?
