Who we help · NGO
We work with organisations whose value is obvious to anyone who sees it and difficult to express in the terms funders require. The problem is rarely a lack of impact. It is that the impact does not fit the instrument used to measure it.
Symolem's founder serves as Vice-Chair of Landfills2Landmarks, a UN-accredited circular economy NGO working in Ghana and the United Kingdom. The work runs from second-hand textile flows into Accra through to producer responsibility frameworks and the market protection questions that follow them, and it is the reason Symolem's policy positions are grounded in what happens at the receiving end of the trade rather than inferred from customs data.
Living Paintings has been bringing the visual world to blind and partially sighted people for more than thirty-five years. It was founded in 1989 by Alison Oldland, an art historian, and it began, as these organisations often do, at a kitchen table.
The charity makes tactile picture books. Raised images that fingers can read, paired with audio descriptions that guide the hand across the page and tell the story of what is being touched, with braille between the pages so a child can read the words themselves. The books are handcrafted by volunteers. They are lent free by post, throughout the United Kingdom, to anyone who needs them. More than two hundred of the world's best-loved picture books have been adapted this way, and more than five thousand blind and visually impaired children in the UK use the library.
Symolem worked with Living Paintings across 2024 and 2025. We measured the charity's corporate carbon footprint and the product carbon footprint of its books, and wrote its sustainability report.
The product footprint was the interesting part, and it is a good illustration of why standard accounting misleads on this kind of organisation. A tactile book is a physical object with a real material footprint — moulded surfaces, print, braille, audio media, packaging — and it is handcrafted rather than manufactured at scale, which pushes the per-unit figure up against any mass-produced comparator. But the books are not sold. They are lent, by free post, returned, and lent again, to child after child, for years. The unit that matters is not the book, it is the reading. Any footprint expressed per item produced makes a reuse library look worse than the disposable alternative it replaces, and a footprint expressed per use tells the opposite and truer story. Getting that boundary right was the substance of the work, and it is the same boundary question that decides whether circular business models look good or bad in a carbon report anywhere else.
The corporate footprint and the sustainability report gave the charity something else it did not have: a disclosure it could put in front of funders, trusts and corporate partners who increasingly ask for one, at a scale of organisation where nobody has a sustainability department to produce it.
Mary's Meals does one thing. It provides a child with one meal a day, in their place of education.
It began in 1992, when Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow and his brother Fergus filled a Land Rover with blankets and food and drove it to Bosnia, and became Scottish International Relief. In 2002, after MacFarlane-Barrow met a dying mother in Malawi and her eldest son Edward, who said his hopes in life were to have enough to eat and to go to school one day, the organisation refocused entirely on school feeding and took its present name. It started by feeding two hundred children. It now reaches around three million children every school day, and its global headquarters is still a tin shed in Dalmally, in Argyll. A meal costs around ten pence. A child can be fed for an entire school year for about nineteen pounds.
It works in some of the hardest places there are — Sudan and South Sudan among them, where conflict has produced what is widely described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, and where the programme continues only because local partners stay when war breaks out, because it is their home.
Symolem has not measured impact for Mary's Meals. We have been in active discussion with the organisation, and nothing on this page represents work we have carried out for them or findings we have produced. What follows is our own view of why measuring this particular intervention is so difficult — and it is difficult in ways that apply across the school feeding sector.
The countable thing is not the important thing. Meals served is an output, and it is an unusually clean one: three million per school day, ten pence each, auditable to the sack of maize. That precision is seductive and it measures the wrong quantity. The intervention's purpose is not nourishment alone. It is that a meal in a classroom makes the classroom worth walking to. What is being bought is attendance, retention, concentration and completion, and none of those is the number the reporting captures.
Attribution is close to impossible. School enrolment moves with harvest cycles, household income, teacher availability, distance, illness, displacement and conflict, all at once. Isolating the contribution of the meal requires a counterfactual, and constructing one means identifying children who would not be fed. That is ethically untenable in exactly the settings where the answer would matter most.
The time horizons do not match. The outcome that justifies the intervention — a child completing an education and leaving the poverty that produced the hunger — resolves over ten to fifteen years. Funders report annually. A reporting cycle that can never reach the outcome pushes every organisation back onto the output it can count this year, which is how a sector ends up measuring meals.
Substitution is invisible and it cuts both ways. A school meal may add to a child's total intake, or it may replace food the household would have provided, releasing that food to a sibling or that money to something else. Both are real effects. Both matter. Standard reporting captures neither, and the second is arguably the larger one.
Conflict destroys comparability. Where the meal matters most, baseline data does not exist, populations move mid-programme, schools close and reopen, and control groups are impossible. Measurability is inversely correlated with need.
The counting unit is rarely disclosed. "Children fed" can mean unique children reached or child-days delivered. A child who receives a meal on a hundred and ninety school days and a child who receives forty are not the same, and aggregate figures seldom distinguish them.
And the cheapest input becomes the benchmark. Ten pence a meal is a genuine achievement built on local procurement and volunteer cooks. But cost-per-meal invites comparison against other organisations' cost-per-meal, which rewards the lowest input price rather than the best outcome, and it renders invisible the local economic activity and community labour that the low price depends on.
None of this is an argument that the intervention is unproven. It is an argument that the measurement instruments in general use were not built for it.
Impact measurement and methodology design. Outcome frameworks that survive funder scrutiny without reducing the work to its most countable component. Where an organisation needs to evidence what changed rather than what was delivered, we apply the Human Impact Equivalence Framework® — our methodology for quantifying outcomes in impacted lives.
Carbon footprinting and sustainability reporting. Corporate and product carbon footprints, and the annual sustainability report that funders, trusts and corporate partners increasingly expect — including the boundary and functional unit decisions that determine whether reuse, repair and lending models are represented fairly.
Grant and funding case development. The evidence base and the argument behind a funding application, written for the assessor who has to score it.
Governance, reporting and partnership structuring. Reporting frameworks, partnership agreements and the structures that let a small organisation take on a larger funder.
Policy positioning. For organisations whose field experience should be shaping regulation and currently is not: consultation responses, position papers and submissions grounded in what the organisation actually sees.