Puuya Foundation / Social Impact Framework

Puuya (meaning ‘life force’)

Puuya Foundation is the only non-profit organisation with dedicated staff on the ground in Lockart River 365 days a year. The majority of its board members are Lockhart River ‘locals’, complemented by dedicated non-local professionals and advisors. Since its inception in 2008 the Puuya Foundation has worked with the local community based on authentic mutual respect and collaboration. Puuya’s mission is to empower the Lockhart River community to set goals and visions for their future and to develop and nurture the skills, knowledge and confidence needed to realise their vision. Puuya has delivered many successful outcomes achieving their goal, the enhancement of quality of life for the people of Lockart River.

Unfortunately, much of the research in the area of measuring social impact in Indigenous communities indicates that relatively few programs or services have published evaluations of their outcomes and even fewer have done so using methods that can reliably indicate whether a program is having the intended effect.

The Girgensohn Foundation is providing funds to develop an effective Evaluation Strategy to measure the social impact of Puuya’s health and education projects and integrate the learnings from this process into future leadership development and life learning projects for members of the community. Once the research and Evaluation Strategy is compiled and documented other Indigenous communities will be able to access and learn from this work. The Puuya Foundation plans to train others in using their evidence based practices.

Final Report 2024 ‘Social Impact Framework for Puuya Foundation’ – Led by Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

5.3. Evolving Shape of the Social Impact Framework

…, the Social Impact Framework has evolved during the research project. This has occurred as a direct result of the co-creation and co-design focus of the project, where the QUT led research team and the Puuya Foundation have scheduled regular engagement. This step-by-step iterative approach to regularly engage, share, reflect, plan, trial, review and revise has been critical. The research has been responsive and collaborative as it needed to reflect the priorities of the Puuya Foundation and community. The framework was updated following the November 2022 visit, with Culture at the centre – with Country, Community, Learning and Leadership all being connected to Culture as our way to best represent the latest discussions with the Puuya team and community during that visit. This visually reflected the centrality of Culture in the community and the ways in which Culture acts as an activating concept for the framework.

9.0. Conclusion

The evolution of the Puuya Foundation is a powerful example of how commitment to being a truly community-led and community-focused organisation can uplift and empower an entire community. Over the cause of this project, and through the work and wisdom of generations before, the Puuya Foundation embedded the values of self-determination and empowerment into the organisation as a reflection of the strengths of the Lockhart River community. Through inclusive respectful and culturally appropriate engagement and consultation to understand and articulate the challenges in community and the ambitions of community, through investment in Indigenous leadership and the belief that local voices have solutions for community, the Puuya Foundation has grown into a trusted and value part of Lockhart River.

This research project followed on from previous research conducted for the Puuya Foundation between 2018-2020 that found that “community-led evaluation could develop and emphasise community objectives and measures for the Puuya Approach and inform a long-term capacity building model, just as the evaluation of specific programs would benefit from wider community input” (Senserrick et al., 2021, p44). The social Impact Framework co-created and co-designed over the past three years has harnessed local expertise to develop approaches to ensuring this expertise informs programs and activities for the community and has designed methods to capture community responses to assess the impact of those programs and activities. The key to this framework is the privileging of community identified indicators of success rather than external key performance indicators.