tracing impact, finding direction.

What is our influence in the world? What gives us orientation as a global community?

The incredible commitment of our members and supporters from all over the globe make a real difference for sustainability. In this, our local student hubs bring a diversity of perspectives and languages to the table and we want to celebrate this in our actions! All efforts on the international level have the needs of our community at their core and respond to what is becoming relevant around us.

Our core ideology and the impact matrix, our tool for tracing our work in real time, give us orientation on the way.

Discover our current impact

Discover our core ideology

Tracking and tracing our influence

oikos Impact Matrix

How do we want to learn, lead and live together?

How can we hold ourselves accountable for what we do while sharing our story with the world, in real-time?

The impact Matrix helps us to track and display the milestones of our work at oikos International while giving insight into the broader impact we have as a community of student change agents. The column collaborations displays some of collaborations with partners and chapters, while the community line offers a sneak peek into the impressive work of our chapters.

Dive into the matrix and how our work explores answers to how we envision learning, leading, living and organizing for a more sustainable future.

Find more information below in our FAQ section.

	Transforming Education	Empowering Student Cases	Strengthening Organization
oikos International	Example 1		Example 1
oikos International	Example 2
Collaborations	Example 1	Example 4
Collaborations
oikos Community	Example 3
oikos Community	Example 2

How do we fill the matrix with incredible community projects?

Our diverse community of student changemakers is always thriving with action and innovative ideas towards sustainability.

At oikos International, we believe that the incredible work and impact of our local chapters deserves to be showcased and celebrated. Our students deserve the spotlight, because their projects are just one sign for the unstoppable drive for change within our community.

Therefore we launched: the Community Impact Contest!

The oikos Community Impact Contest is a participatory, fun and engaging way to invite our chapters into sharing their most important projects. While celebrating each other's work, this will provide a platform to learn, exchange and get inspired within & beyond the oikos community.

To host a truly meaningful contest, we call you - all oikos Chapters - to participate boldly!

Participate

Hand in all projects that you would like to share with our global oikos community, by filling this form (10-15 mins). This way, you will get a chance to share the work of your chapter with the world. Tell us your story behind the project and inspire some hearts from the community.

You can be as creative as you wish.
Vote

Each and every oikee will be able to vote on their preferred projects and initiatives. The voting will be held online and available for everyone.
Celebration & Publication

The initiatives with the most votes from four categories (learning, leading, living & organizing) will be announced and presented on the oikos International website. There will be a special price for all listed initiatives.

Only one thing left to do:

CELEBRATE!

oikos' core ideology.

Our work is guided by our values, a sense of purpose and a strategic vision and mission.

These rather stable elements give us direction and emerge out of co-creation or consultation with our community.

Whereas values are key to how we want to relate with the world and each other (our ethics), our purpose is the why behind what we do and how we do it. The vision statement renders a destination on the map, whereas the mission elaborates in one sentence how we aim to get there.

All of these remain temporary & may change at any time when we sense the need for it.

our core values.

01

Respect

We display honesty and respect towards anyone whom we come in contact with.

02

Integrity

We acknowledge that we are all representatives of oikos, we have a collective impact and avoid situations that go against our purpose.

03

Accountability

We make sole commitments that we can own, understand, keep and operate in a timely manner.

04

Openness

We encourage, support, and allow peers to grow in knowledge, skill, and scope of responsibility, without foregoing coordination.

mission.Our mission.

Mission

To transform economics and management education by empowering student change agents,
raising awareness for sustainability opportunities and challenges, and building
institutional support for curriculum reform.

vision.Our vision.

Vision.

Economics and management education purposed for a sustainable world

purpose.Our purpose.
Purpose.

To create spaces and support for human development on different, interlinked scales, so
that humanity can thrive in alignment with nature.

oikos' organizational purpose.

oikos is shaping the world in several ways and on several levels and our purpose is evolving over time and transferred into language together with our community.

Out of this co-creative process, our current understanding of our purpose should be represented from the multiple levels we act upon.

By following our passion through developing, co-creating and implementing a diverse multi-level, hands-on commitment, we, therefore, contribute actively to a planetary sustainable development with a focus on the societal leverages of higher education and economics.

More about our organizational purpose

Individual development

oikos' purpose is to create spaces and support for human development on different, interlinked scales, so that humanity can thrive in alignment with nature.

Institutional development

oikos shapes mindsets.

By addressing sustainability change agents in university environments with tools and programs for self-development and awareness building, the organization enables and inspires its members to move forward on their learning journey and actively contribute to a sustainable world.

Programs like the LEAP support the shift of worldviews.

International development

With over 45 active chapters in universities with business schools in 4 continents, the organization has a powerful outreach to the institutions that define and equal education.

Being organized in a self-managing structure, the single student-led chapters adopt their action portfolio to the local needs and address sustainability in curricular and extracurricular contexts.

On the international level, we support this work by calling the chapters and other stakeholders together to co-create the structures of tomorrow’s higher education.

Planetary sustainable development

As the subgroups and regions come together to form an international community, the influence of oikos also lies in the strong bonds created between nations, cultures, partners and student change agents all around the world.

The glue that holds the organization together: a passion to contribute to a higher cause, to make our world more sustainable by acting on it and collaborating towards the goal.

Get to know our Impact Matrix in detail!

Frequently asked questions

Below are some of our most common questions regarding our Impact Matrix.

How is the matrix structured?

On the horizontal axis, the matrix follows oikos’ main initiative focuses.

The vertical axis shows a distinction between movements on the international level, collaborations with and from the community and flagship activities of our chapters.

Merging these perspectives helps you to get a better insight into the full range of our impact.

What’s in the Impact Matrix, what isn’t?

What is tracked

Our core international initiatives & projects, both ongoing & one-time
Selected, diverse initiatives of our chapters that have been chosen by the community

What isn't tracked

Relational
Non-hierarchical/distributed
Contextual with an eco-centric perspective

How do we feed the matrix?

The matrix is self-organized, and the self-organization is supported by a group of matrix facilitators.

The initiative team updates the matrix autonomously. Every 3 months, all initiative teams fill in the matrix themselves, using it as a tool for accountability, planning & reflection.

This is what we call real-time strategy.

Upon handing in the update, the facilitator invites the team for a 45-minute, reflective check-in to support the process and point out gaps in the matrix and how to address them. After checking-in with all teams, the facilitators meet for a quarterly clean up & storage maintenance.

Closed initiatives change their status from active to passive and can be re-accessed through the database function on the website, showcasing the development of our impact over time.

The selected chapter projects are integrated on a bi-annual basis, based on an explicit participatory process (see below). Every 6 months, the oikos team gathers to look at the matrix together, with the aim of concluding focus points for the next semesters.

How do we trace our community's impact?

Tracking & tracing the impact of our community is a challenging task, considering the organically rising number of chapters and the decentralized, self-organizing nature of the network.
We encourage our chapters to get creative in their reporting, share best practices and reflect on their journey in their chapter impact dashboards, a tool that has been developed with similar and complementary intentions as the matrix. We create a summary on a biannual level, you can read it here.

The selection of Chapter Projects featured in the Impact Matrix are sampled through our bi-annual chapter impact contest, where chapters can nominate their projects & the community votes for the most impactful ones.

Next to presenting a bigger part of our impact map, this empowers other chapters to directly reach out for potential collaboration and get ideas for chapter projects.

How do we trace our international team's impact?

oikos is running several international initiatives with the aim of tending the oikos community and supporting them in their missions.

The Impact Matrix gives an overview of all projects and initiatives and their strategic focus. It serves as a continuous impact dashboard for our community work.

Both ongoing & one-time initiatives use the tools to plan and report back on milestones and achievements, linking back to the stories we have to share as the project progresses.

A part of this: our revolutionary way of organizing! Our work at oikos goes beyond what we do in our initiatives. All of our initiative efforts wouldn't be possible without the support of several operational functions that help sustain and strengthen our complex organization over time.

In over 30 years, the world and the organization itself changed a lot and we keep adapting to our needs and the continuously shifting contexts. Growing more agile over time with a focus on learning in a trusting, meaningful environment increases our resilience as an organization - a trend that ripples through and inspires our chapters, as well.

Even if many of these things, like organizational culture, appear intangible at first sight, we give our best to open windows and showcase our main initiatives that help us to ride on top of the wave of our times.

The impact matrix is one tool to present what we do in fields like organizational development, fundraising, communications, IT etc.

Any other questions? Reach out to us at info@oikos-international.org!

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