Value does not stop at the individual
Most impact reports stop at the direct participant. But value moves — through whānau, households, communities and time. If our boundary stops at one person, our account understates what actually happened.
The idea
By Dr Jay Whitehead ·
Value transmission · Impact boundaries · Whānau
A programme may work directly with one person while changing what becomes possible for a household, a whānau, a workplace or a future generation. The direct participant matters, but the analytical boundary should not automatically end there.
The practical task is to describe the transmission pathway. Who else is affected? What moves between them? Over what period? What would be visible if the pathway were present? These questions turn a broad claim about collective value into something that can be tested.
Widening the boundary does not mean claiming every possible ripple. It means looking deliberately for material effects beyond the individual, then retaining only those supported by context-specific evidence.
A contribution to discussion
© 2026 Dr Jay Whitehead. Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. Invited contributors retain copyright and agree the licence shown on their note before publication.