At ROI, we know that change doesn’t come out of nowhere. To be a successful organization, it’s vital to be clear about your goals and strategies for making them happen over time. A key part of how we accomplish change is through the intentional planning and goal setting processes that ensure our actions align with our mission. 

When ROI was founded in 2017, we began working with community members from northeastern North Carolina to create our Theory of Change, a type of systems map designed to help us understand trauma, the forces behind it, and how we can create programs to help communities become more trauma-informed. Since then, we’ve trained thousands of community members to become resilient leaders through our many programs. We’ve seen great results in the communities we’ve served, assisting with everything from healing generational trauma and informing institutions about using restorative responses, to helping frontline communities rebuild after natural disasters. 

We’re proud of the work we’ve done over the last five years. But now, we’re thinking bigger. We’re asking, how can we take our efforts to the next level?

After five years, we’ve returned our attention to our Theory of Change. With the help of our community partners and support from SVT Ventures, we’ve created an updated Theory of Change plan to drive our strategies for the next five years. This plan will help us outline our mission and the long term impacts we aim to achieve, along with how we’ll get there and results we hope to see along the way. All of our programs will lead toward achieving these goals. 

Here, we’re sharing how we plan to accomplish positive social change in the next five years.  We hope that this plan not only shows you our goals, but inspires your organization with new strategies to document your own plans and expected results to keep your objectives on track.

ROI’s Theory of Change

Part 1: Our Mission

Before diving into our goals for long-term impact, we wanted to first clarify ROI’s mission statement. A strong mission statement should concisely explains your organization’s core goals, who you serve, and how you serve them:

We seek to support critically under-resourced youth, organizations and communities in rural North Carolina to interrupt the cycle of generational trauma and design innovative solutions for healing and resilience.

A mission statement statement lays a foundation your  systems map and will be helpful to refer back to as you continue developing your Theory of Change. 

Part 2: Key Strategies

In this section, we described the strategies we use to ensure our mission is carried out in our communities. Our list of strategies includes:

• Equipping communities for positive change by securing funding and supporting community leaders
• Creating effective solutions through data collection, listening and engagement
• Exchanging knowledge by documenting our findings and sharing them with others
• Being transparent by creating structures and procedures that inform the community about our work and hold our organization accountable
• Embodying best practicing by embedding healing and restorative practices in our own organization.

In your own systems map, your strategies should include the ways you help your community and keep your organization accountable for growth. You may want to brainstorm what strategies have worked for your group in the past, as well as strategies you want to improve upon in the coming years.

Part 3: Results, Short & Long Term

This is the section of your systems map where you can be clear about the types of results you wish to see from the key strategies listed in the previous section. These should be concrete results you can see over time that will let you know your organization is on track with your goals. Start with your anticipated short term results. At ROI, in the near future we want our communities to:

• Develop a collective knowledge of healing and trauma awareness
• Practice healing responses with themselves and others
• Connect to other organizations and communities to build networks of support that promote restorative responses

We also included goals for the long-term future; over the next several years, we want our communities to:

• Gain resources that allow them to identify solutions for trauma-related issues
• Shift policies and practices of public institutions to be restorative and informed
• Increase access to tools for communities to learn healing practices
• Equalize respect for rural and urban innovation

It’s best to make your anticipated results specific and measurable; this will make it very clear if you are meeting your desired results as you reexamine your systems map over the years.

Part 4: Impact

Your impact section is where you can do some thoughtful daydreaming. What is your ultimate goal for your organization? If all your efforts worked perfectly, what would your impact on your community be? Think about these ideas deeply and make sure they fall within your mission statement and can be accomplished through your strategies. ROI’s impact section includes:

• Promoting generational healing through long lasting changes across health, educational and economic institutions that benefit individuals and the community
• Giving communities tools to innovate and create solutions for issues on their own
• Creating just policies and institutions that reverse generations of injustice 
• Improving rural innovation and showing other organizations what frontline communities have to offer 
• Inspiring other communities with ROI’s approach to social change

As you can see, these goals are aspirational, yet attainable. They are very likely to happen if your organization stays accountable to the mission laid out in your map.

The Benefits of Creating a Theory of Change

Reexamining your goals and the ways you promote positive change not only holds your organization accountable, but it ensures your organization’s actions align with your core values. It’s easy to get lost in day to day work and become distracted by side projects in your organization; by documenting your mission and how you’ll get there, you can help focus your efforts more clearly and ensure that all of your work propels you toward your desired impacts. In this way, a systems map can be a great tool for both new organizations who are defining their values for the first time, and for experienced organizations who want to refine their goals for the next several years.

Creating a Theory of Change can be an excellent way to align your organization’s mission with your long term goals. If you have questions about how to create this type of systems map, contact ROI’s co-founder, Vichi Jagannathan at vichi@ruralopportunity.org.