Workshops & Events

To foster social innovation across Europe today means navigating a widening gap between two realities. One is the reality of reporting: the necessary demand for accountability, data, and proof of impact. The other is the reality of our ecosystems: a call for working with complexity, shifting power, and acknowledging that true systemic change is rarely linear.

For too long, evaluation has functioned as an extractive exercise: mining data to count the short-term "fruits" of a project while ignoring the health of the "soil" (trust, relationships, and capacity) that sustains them.

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The Roundtable

As part of the European Social Innovation Alliance (ESIA) project, SEND e.V. and Unity Effect invite you to a thematic deep-dive into the future of impact measurement and evaluation.

In this 90-minute interactive roundtable, we will bridge the gap between rigorous reporting and complex reality. We will introduce "Regenerative Evaluation", the Impact Garden framework, and a methodology designed to help social innovators, funders, and policymakers make credible claims about their contribution to systemic change without oversimplifying the story.

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Preparation & Open Source Resources:

All frameworks shared in this session are fully open source. To get a head start before the roundtable, we invite you to read Unity Effect’s blog post on “M&E in Complexity: Presenting a methodology for making credible claims” where you can also download the complete Methodology Brief.

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Who is this for?

Social entrepreneurs, impact investors, policymakers, and ecosystem builders who are looking for alternatives to rigid logframes.

For decades, the social impact sector has been obsessed with the "Heropreneur" and the traditional Theory of Change: a linear model that assumes we can individually predict, control, and attribute complex systemic shifts entirely to our own interventions.

But what happens when your work is about capacity building, education, and network weaving? How do you measure your impact when your true role is tending the soil for others to grow?

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Join Unity Effect and Systems. Change. Educators. Unite. (SCEU) for a dialogue on moving from a rigid "Theory of Change" to a living "Theory of Systems Change.” In this 60-minute interactive session, we will explore how to move out of the linear causality model fueled by the typical use of Theory of Change and into more regenerative infrastructure for your organization and ecosystem. We will introduce the shift from “solutions” to “contributions” and then explore the Impact Garden, a framework that helps practitioners and educators map the intangible dynamics of their work, understand their evolving roles (from direct service to systems thinking), and measure systemic vitality.

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Who is this for?

Systems change practitioners, university educators, capacity builders, and M&E professionals who know that real change is a collective, relational process and are looking for the precise language and tools to map it.

​In a post-growth, decolonial world, the way we track progress, success, and “impact” requires a radical rethinking. This Playground opens a conversation on regenerative monitoring and evaluation - moving from extractive metrics to ways of knowing that honour life, complexity, and relationship.

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​Together, we’ll ask:

• ​What does evaluation look like when marketing is part of a living system?
• ​How do we measure without reducing, colonising, or commodifying?
• ​What stories or surprises emerge when we reframe metrics through a regenerative lens?
• ​How do post-growth businesses build accountability without falling into the traps of old models?

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​✨ Key Outcomes

• ​Understand the principles of regenerative evaluation and how they apply to marketing.
• ​Explore methods that balance qualitative story, embodied experience, and systemic health.
• ​Learn how organisations are experimenting with post-colonial approaches to impact measurement.

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​🌱 Why Attend

​If you’ve felt the tension between “measurable results” and the deeper truths of transformation, this Playground invites you to explore ways of aligning evaluation with the values of life, equity, and care.

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​🎯 Who This Is For

• ​Marketing and business leaders committed to post-growth and decolonial approaches.
• ​Practitioners seeking to evolve beyond KPIs toward living metrics.
• ​Evaluators, strategists, and change-makers curious about how to measure progress without replicating extractive logic.

Evaluation often feels like a tax on doing good. We extract data to satisfy external demands, but rarely does that process feed energy back into our own work or the communities we serve.

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The Regenerative Signal is a 6-month professional development journey (May–October 2026) that helps you shift evaluation from reporting burden to strategic asset.

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Join us for this live Q&A session to learn more. We'll explore the program structure and offer live coaching for 1 or 2 evaluation challenges from the group. This is an opportunity to get your questions answered and understand how to make the case within your organisation.

The Regenerative Signal 2026 is a 6-month online learning journey running from May through October 2026, with five live Zoom sessions plus self-paced application work between sessions. Participants receive an official Certificate of Completion, access to core frameworks, a digital workbook, and a peer community, with a private 1:1 consultation included for Organization and Corporate tickets.

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The program is built for practitioners who feel that monitoring and evaluation has become a compliance exercise, where data is collected to satisfy funders rather than to strengthen the work itself. Regenerative Signal reframes M&E as a strategic asset, helping you move from static reporting to dynamic sense-making grounded in methodological integrity and a genuinely regenerative paradigm.

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Across the journey, you'll develop the skills to map non-linear change, make credible claims about systemic contribution without oversimplifying, and measure the intangible human capacities like trust, resilience, and ownership that underpin real results. You'll leave with a tailored evaluation framework built around a current project of your own, ready to implement.

Most of us working in social change have a complicated relationship with power. We know when we don’t have it: in teams where decisions happen around us, in systems that seem immune to influence. But we're also reluctant to fully step into our own power, because we've seen what harm looks like when power goes unexamined. That ambivalence keeps us stuck. And it shows up everywhere: in how we lead teams, navigate funding relationships, handle conflict, and hold ourselves back from the influence we're actually positioned to have.

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In this workshop, we’ll share what we’ve learned about power from supporting organisations that drive change, coaching leaders, and our own experience as the Unity Effect team.

In this 90-minute workshop, we will:

• Identify and explore power dynamics in teams and collaborations
• Name the patterns that keep you oscillating between powerlessness and avoidance
• Gain a new understanding of your Personal Agency and influence
• Discover the next steps for building healthy, power-aware collaboration

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Who is this for?

Team leads, systems change practitioners, network weavers, funding organisations, who know that real change is a collective, relational process and are looking for ways to fully step into their power while empowering others.