What We Choose to Count: How Social Value & the SROI Principles can support Truth & Reconciliation
National Truth and Reconciliation Day is a moment for Canadians to acknowledge the historical and ongoing injustices committed against Indigenous peoples, and to take up our responsibility to turn that acknowledgement into action: justice, equity and repair for Indigenous peoples and communities.
At Social Value Canada, we have been reflecting on how social value thinking can help carry that responsibility forward:
Co-development as the starting point. The first three principles of social return on investment (SROI): Involve Those Affected, Understanding What Changes, Value What Matters, these are the foundation of an approach that fundamentally seeks to hear the voices of all people and to embed understanding of lived experience into design, implementation and accountability systems. This is why Social Value has been embedded into the work of the Whanau Ora Commissioning Agency in New Zealand.
Telling the full truth about impact. Reconciliation begins with truth, and social value thinking asks us to look honestly at harms as well as benefits. A highway, a mine or a housing policy can look like a success from one worldview, while displacing families or cutting people off from their land. Naming those impacts, past and present, is where accountability starts.
Counting what markets miss. Ecological stewardship and cultural continuity rarely show up on a balance sheet: a watershed cared for across generations, a language kept alive, a business built on reciprocity rather than extraction. Social value thinking treats these as outcomes worth protecting and investing in, measured on communities' own terms rather than folded into someone else's return on investment.
Putting purchasing power to work. Hospitals, universities, governments and companies spend billions every year. When contracts weigh who gets the job, who gains the skills and who owns the business, that spending can become a young person's first apprenticeship or a family's path to wealth close to home. Even more, when the definition of ‘best value’ includes an acknowledgement of the value of outcomes on people affected, procurement contract value to Indigenous businesses puts Call to Action 92 into practice.
For those of us who practise social value, doing this well means holding our own methods to a higher standard:
Respect for data sovereignty. Too often, information has been taken from Indigenous communities and used without their say. Principles such as OCAP® (ownership, control, access and possession), developed by the First Nations Information Governance Centre, keep communities in control of their own stories and data.
Room for many ways of knowing. In the spirit of Two-Eyed Seeing, articulated by Mi'kmaw Elder Albert Marshall, lived experience and traditional knowledge carry as much weight as numbers, which in practice means an Elder's account of a river's health belongs in an evaluation alongside a water-quality report, not beneath it.
Prioritization versus Monetization. Land, ceremony and culture hold meaning no dollar figure can truly capture. This discussion paper on an Indigenous Approach to Living Standards (also from New Zealand) challenges us to consider wellbeing from a much wider sense of worldview. Truly understanding value requires a clear sense of prioritization from another perspective. When monetizing to represent that value undermines the point of social value thinking, a strong understanding of priorities from another’s point of view is the better approach.
No substitute for justice. Social value approaches can support, but never replace, treaty obligations, land rights and reparations.
These are commitments, not conclusions. The real test is what changes after September 30, in the partnerships we build, the contracts we award, and the lives of the children, families and communities those choices touch.