Digital Stories of Impact
Evaluating restoration through communities’ lived experiences.
Understanding how restoration affects communities requires more than standard monitoring metrics. Many of the most important changes, such as evolving relationships, shifts in identity and a renewed sense of place, are difficult to capture through traditional evaluation methods. As a result, significant experiences often go unrecorded and unacknowledged, leaving gaps in how social impacts are understood and responded to.
Creative and participatory approaches can provide deeper insight, yet they are rarely used in restoration monitoring. This project will explore how storytelling methods can help practitioners better understand how restoration is experienced by the people most closely connected to these landscapes and seascapes.
What the project will do
The project will develop and test a practical method for using Most Significant Change (MSC) with digital storytelling to evaluate the social impacts of restoration. MSC is a participatory technique for gathering stories of personal change, while digital storytelling enables participants to create short films that reflect their own experiences.
The approach will be co-developed with Cumbria Connect before being tested with Solent Seascape to explore how easily it can be used by practitioners. By sharing digital stories created by local communities, the project will provide feedback to restoration teams and expand understanding of the social dimensions of restoration.
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