Impact Stories: Learning and Inspiration
Listen & Sea
Over the last couple of years I have been working on an exciting collaboration with a group of Bioacoustics Scientists. Bioacoustics is a cross-disciplinary science that combines biology and acoustics. Usually it refers to the investigation of sound production, dispersion and reception in animals.
Together with the African Bioacoustics Community, we have developed the “Listening for Life” Project: a science-art collaboration that promotes active and mindful listening to nature, encouraging conservation at the community level by connecting people to nature through sound. We have facilitated listening workshops, hosted listening retreats and painted public murals in the Kruger National Park, flagship of the wild South African National Parks.
This experience as an artist has been really incredible to work alongside scientists but has also helped me to tune into the art of listening and being aware of the soundscape around me. On our recent visit to Mannheim I was very intrigued to experience a Silent Lab, and dive into the possibilities and potentials.
Our Silent Lab was hosted on the 17th of May at the Graduate School Rein-Neckar, as part of their open day for new students. There was definitely an air of excitement and anticipation in the room as we gathered. Tom & Nick held the space beautifully, with a strength that put everyone at ease and assured us that if in any moment we felt uncomfortable we could remove the headphones and step out. We were doing a session on democracy… an immersive audio which welcomed us in and together (yet apart in our own audio worlds) we listened and responded.
The prompts encouraged us to move around the room and interact with each other. We were given the opportunity to ‘vote’ by positioning our bodies in the different corners of the room according to our own choices. The 10 minute audio was a powerful way to deep dive into a topic and gave an embodied experience of democracy in a held and effective way.
Smiles all round as we lifted our headphones off. Being able to share in the Silent Lab that day has given me an expanse of possibility to connect this method back into Bioacoustics and public artwork. This is where ill pause on this story for now because something is beginning to stir which could see the development of something super exciting – you will have to listen and sea.
Claire Homewood, Amava Oluntu, South Africa
Business tools for social impact
It’s not uncommon that tools developed for business innovation or industrial processes turn out to be useful in the field of social work—provided they are rethought critically. That was one of the most stimulating aspects of this mobility: the chance to reflect with other professionals on how visual models—such as canvases—can support the design of socially impactful projects. The goal wasn’t to apply business logic as-is, but rather to adapt and repurpose these tools as frameworks to read complexity, plan more clearly, and communicate ideas more effectively.
Models like the Business Model Canvas, the Social Business Model Canvas, or the Value Proposition Canvas, when used thoughtfully, can help make visible the inner logic of a project: key relationships, actors involved, available resources, beneficiaries, as well as costs, flows, risks, and impacts. In many social contexts, this kind of clarity is often missing—not due to lack of skill, but due to the absence of accessible and structured tools. Working visually helps bring structure to that complexity, clarify connections, and enable more productive dialogue between professionals with different roles and backgrounds.
One of the most relevant concerns that emerged was the economic sustainability of social initiatives over the medium and long term. Many social projects rely on short-term funding or irregular external contributions. Using these models encourages more strategic thinking about what might make a project sustainable over time: what alliances to build, what resources to activate, and what types of value to generate—beyond the purely financial. It doesn’t offer guarantees, but it provides a useful framework for imagining more resilient strategies.
These tools also serve a pedagogical function: they create a common language—neither too technical nor too vague. They allow heterogeneous teams—educators, administrators, project managers, community workers—to work from a shared base. When used during the design phase, they help teams visualize roles, critical issues, and strategic priorities, which improves decision-making and ensures greater coherence between goals and methods.
The mobility provided a valuable opportunity to compare different approaches: some participants came from highly structured contexts, others from more informal backgrounds, but across the board there was a shared need for clear, flexible tools to make sense of their work. The discussions also highlighted the need for replicable, transferable frameworks. Well-constructed canvases and models not only help internal coordination but also allow methods to be documented, shared, and translated across different sectors.
Ultimately, this reflection reinforced the value of crossing disciplinary boundaries. When used critically and contextually, tools drawn from the world of business can make social work more transparent, more stable, and ultimately, more effective.
Pietro Speziali, Eufemia, Italy
Unexpected Learnings – A Personal Account
This project has really opened my mind in so many unexpected ways. Whilst the focus has been on how we as organisations create pathways for migrant youth to integrate into communities of support that aid their entrepreneurial journey, I have been surprised by how personal the learning space became around my own understanding of culture and politics of place and belonging and relationship to land and integration into it..
By experiencing hosting and being hosted, I tasted first hand how it feels to arrive in a foreign place with a foreign language and a different set of rules and expectations that govern behaviours. By experiencing this multiple times in a relatively short space of time, I gained insights into how it might feel to be continuously displaced and the resulting need to adjust your own behaviour as you find yourself in a new place.
What do you pay attention to? What remains constant? What changes to yourself need to be made? As host, as hosted, how do you adjust to create harmony and cohesion and the ability to collaborate? I found myself paying closer attention to the people around me. Observing social etiquette, choice of words, volume of conversation, speed of response, pauses between responses, slowing down speech, ways of greeting, forms of embrace, ways of walking in public space, eye contact, lack of eye contact, public transport, physical safety, emotional safety, rituals around food, freedom of expression.
While this enhanced attention to detail was a necessity to navigate new situations, it has unfolded in me a deeper appreciation for everything around me and a much stronger sense of responsibility for my own behaviour and the effect that even the smallest details of how I interact in a space have a huge impact on how those around me feel able or unable to interact.
I have been deeply humbled by this learning and have much gratitude for how this will enrich all of my interactions in the future.
Theresa Wigley, Amava Oluntu, South Africa
Cooking Hands
Day 1 of the training week in Turin: The agenda brings us to the kitchen of Il Gusto del Mondo, where we start by packing bags, boxes, and tools. We load everything into the cars and begin our journey across the city. Traffic is heavy — a typical hot Monday in June — but as we leave the urban noise behind, the landscape slowly opens up: more green, more nature.
We arrive at AgriCoop in Pecetto Torinese, where we’re welcomed by a sea of cherry trees. Pure enchantment.
It’s a day of visits, but above all, of hands at work. Paola leads us through a cooking workshop where everyone is focused: notebooks in hand, writing down recipes — not just ingredients, but gestures, techniques, and tools. Each step is filled with meaning, carrying stories of a society where pasta becomes a symbol of women’s empowerment, a tool against inequality, and a practice of sharing.
These are stories passed through food — and I can already feel this project will guide us deeper into them. Stories from here, where I live, and from the other side of the world.
One moment stayed with me: Tom, attentively taking notes, documenting every single step. It felt like the activity entered his home, and maybe even his future projects. Perhaps not with food — but with storytelling, with the knowledge of what has been and how it still resonates in our present.
Every project holds this potential: to find the hands willing to get involved, to knead change, and to guide others through it.
At the long table in France
I have arrived in France for the final mobility phase of this project. We are living here in a rural idyll that resembles the set of a film set in a different, more romantic era – before me stands an old mill, located directly on the river, a huge orchard, a long table laden with cheese, fruit and delicacies from the region. The scent of rosemary is in the air and somewhere in the distance you can hear the bleating of the sheep that also live here on the property.
How lucky we are, not only because of the places we get to travel to and see, but also because on our travels and encounters we meet people and learn about projects that make it hard not to dream of a better world.
From organisations that set up rural cooking workshops and festivals, to associations that bring people together across cultural, linguistic and national borders and connect them through cooking, to experimental methods of minimising unemployment within a village, focusing not on the numbers themselves but on the connections that arise between people along the way. People who give their attention and time to their environment and their neighbourhood and are rewarded for it with participation and involvement. I can hardly contain my amazement and want to get straight to work and incorporate this magic of cooperation into my own type of projects. The strength it seems,. lies in the ability to create strong connections and networks between all the associations involved in this region. Rather than being in a state of competition due to a lack of governmental funding, they share, co-create, bond, and bundle the resources they have. It seems like an Utopia and yet it is real. Does this all work because we are in the country side and you need to rely on one another for creating the environment you want to have? If so, can this be duplicated into an urban environment like Mannheim? I will try, that is definite.
Sarah Pint, Starkmacher e.V., Germany