As part of our project, a socio-economic research process called Social Return on Investment (SROI) was conducted in our seven Pilot sites. The SROI is a forecast analysis of the social impact that can be generated by the intervention in the first year following the project completion.

The SROI framework is a methodology applied to design and evaluate activities or projects that promote social change through the participation of local actors. It examines the outputs of the project, i.e., the expected tangible and measurable products while also focusing on the outcomes, i.e., the changes experienced by the beneficiaries, with the aim of calculating the social value created by a specific intervention.

Intense stakeholder engagement, combined with a review of the available SROI literature and secondary data, made it possible to identify the most relevant and significant changes that can be generated by VARCITIES and to hypothesize the number of subjects who will experience these benefits. The study then calculates the social value of these changes through a process of approximation to financial values (proxies), which allowed attributing monetary values to outcomes for which there is no defined market price. Finally, the obtained social value is refined through discount rates provided by the SROI that account for what would have happened regardless of the intervention or thanks to other external realities and factors present on the territory.

SROI analysis in Dundalk

In the pilot area of Dundalk, VARCITIES has intended to regenerate the Library and Museum Courtyard, with the creation of a diverse, accessible, safe, inclusive and high-quality green area to well-being and health, and deliver a fair and equitable distribution of the associated benefits.

The research had the following objectives:

• to estimate what will be the social and economic changes that the 3 Visionary Solutions carried out in Dundalk will be able to generate for the key stakeholders of the project, also by calculating the ratio between benefits produced and intervention costs (called “SROI ratio”)
• to offer useful insights for an improved design and management of activities, that accounts for stakeholders’ actual needs and expectations
• to contribute to the dissemination of the results derived from engagement activities, aiming to share the findings with the subjects involved in the research and receive feedback on the results obtained

The citizens of Dundalk were involved in three collective discussion activities (focus groups and workshops) on the SROI to give their opinion on what changes VARCITIES can produce for different types of users.

To calculate the estimate of the overall social value of the intervention, the number of stakeholders expected to experience significant change thanks to VARCITIES has been multiplied by the monetary value (proxy) associated with each outcome. The sum of these data, corrected with discount rates and projected over a time frame considered realistic, represents the set of social benefits generated from VARCITIES on the territory of Dundalk.