Rethinking impact, accountability and relational practice
This blog shares insights from Rosie Gallen’s PhD research into community development, public housing, and wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand. The research underpins much of Powerdigm’s thinking about relational practice, ethical navigation, and how impact and accountability systems shape real-world work. It offers practical reflections for organisations and leaders grappling with how to evidence impact without undermining the conditions that make change possible.
We’re not short on impact. We’re short on ways to recognise it.
Rosie Gallan PhD – Powerdigm Associate
Across community organisations and public systems, there is growing pressure to do three things at once: deliver outcomes, demonstrate impact with confidence, and work in ways that are relational, culturally grounded, and responsive to lived experience.
On paper, these goals look compatible. In practice, they often pull in different directions.
Long-term, practice-embedded research in Aotearoa New Zealand — particularly in public housing and community development contexts — points to a consistent pattern: the way we design systems to evidence impact often fails to reflect how change actually happens.
Relational work is not “extra” — it is core
Trust, familiarity, and presence are not soft add-ons. They are the conditions that make participation, engagement, and change possible.
Change is rarely driven by programmes alone. It is enabled through everyday encounters: people being seen, listened to, and treated with consistency and care over time.
Yet organisational systems often struggle to recognise this work. Outputs are counted, activities are logged, but the relational labour that underpins outcomes is assumed rather than designed for.
When relational work is under-valued, outcomes become fragile — even when delivery looks strong on paper.
Practice happens in ethical navigation, not straight lines
Frontline practice is rarely linear. Practitioners operate in spaces of ethical tension, constantly balancing organisational requirements, professional judgement, cultural obligations, and the realities of people’s lives.
This work involves discretion and care: knowing when to slow down, when to adapt, when to hold a boundary, and when to challenge process. These judgements are central to good outcomes, yet largely invisible in formal reporting.
When organisations assume practice is simply about “implementing” a model, they miss both the complexity and the skill involved in doing the work well.
Accountability systems shape behaviour — often unintentionally
Accountability tools are not neutral. They shape what organisations prioritise, resource, and protect.
When success is defined narrowly — through outputs, counts, or short-term indicators — learning, reflection, and relational depth are often squeezed out. Not because they don’t matter, but because they are harder to evidence within existing frameworks.
This creates a risk that organisations become better at performing accountability than at strengthening the conditions that lead to sustainable change.
Importantly, this is rarely about bad intent. It is a design issue: tools built for certainty and standardisation being applied to complex, relational work.
Trust is built through everyday encounters
The research consistently shows that trust and wellbeing are shaped through small, repeated interactions: a familiar face, a respectful conversation, someone following through when they say they will.
These moments rarely feature in reports, yet they are the mechanisms through which change occurs. When systems fail to see this, they risk investing heavily in programmes while neglecting the relational conditions that allow those programmes to work.
For communities, this can feel like being constantly asked to adapt to systems that do not recognise how change actually happens.
The issue is not evidence — it is how we hold it
The answer is not to abandon measurement. It is to hold evidence differently.
Narrative, lived experience, and practitioner insight are often dismissed as anecdotal because they are gathered inconsistently and without clear purpose. When collected intentionally, linked to outcomes, triangulated with other forms of information, and interpreted collaboratively, qualitative evidence becomes credible and useful for decision-making.
This is not about lowering standards. It is about designing evidence approaches that are fit for the realities of community work.
What this means for organisations and leaders
The implications are practical:
- recognise relational work as skilled labour, not background effort
- design accountability systems that support learning, not just compliance
- value practitioner judgement as insight, not risk
- invest in evidence approaches that can hold lived experience without flattening it
The challenge is not choosing between care and accountability. It is designing systems where the two reinforce each other.
Because if our systems cannot recognise the conditions that make change possible, they will struggle to sustain it.
Rosie Gallen is a researcher and practitioner whose PhD explores community development, public housing, and wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work underpins much of Powerdigm’s thinking about relational practice, ethical navigation, and how impact and accountability systems shape real-world community mahi.
Want to explore this in your own context?
Powerdigm works with organisations, funders, and public agencies to design impact and accountability approaches that are ethical, relational, and fit for complex community work.