The Indigenous Innovation Initiative Impact Evaluation redefined how impact measurement can honour Indigenous ways of knowing.
COYA Productions, through Rooted Action Analysis™ (RAA), supported the I3 team and their innovators to embody their Theory of Change rather than simply document it.

RAA invited participants to identify their strengths, values, and living practices — not just their outputs — and to map these to their intended community outcomes. The framework centred innovators as the primary knowledge holders and positioned evaluation as an act of ceremony, reflection, and reciprocity.

Through guided gatherings, visual mapping, and narrative data collection, the evaluation process measured how Indigenous innovation strengthens relationships, builds community capacity, and generates both social and systemic change. By approaching evaluation as ceremony, the project honoured story as data, relationships as evidence, and accountability as love in action.

This work demonstrated that when Indigenous innovators are centred, the measurement of impact becomes an extension of self-determination.

The OneFeather Impact Report was not a traditional data report — it was an interactive educational platform designed to measure and strengthen understanding among investors and allies about the Indian Act and the enduring impacts of colonization on Indigenous identity.

Instead of asking participants to simply read impact results, the platform guided them through a learning experience that revealed their own level of awareness. Each section began with reflective questions about Indigenous identity, rights, and economic systems, and then provided context about how federal policy — particularly the Indian Act — has shaped access to wealth, citizenship, and self-determination.

As participants progressed, the tool measured growth in knowledge, empathy, and accountability in real time. By blending impact reporting with interactive learning, the report became both a mirror and a map: it showed OneFeather’s measurable social change outcomes while simultaneously deepening investors’ understanding of the systems they are helping to transform.

At its core, this impact report measured not just outcomes, but awakening.

The SAGE Initiative Learning Harvest was designed to surface and celebrate the lived experiences of the SAGE Cousins — Indigenous women and gender-diverse investors participating in Canada’s first Indigenous women’s impact investing collective.

COYA Productions facilitated a trauma-informed, participatory learning process that blended hands-on financial literacy activities with story-based reflection and in-person dialogue. Rather than surveying or extracting data, we created spaces of right relationship where participants could safely share how their identities, experiences, and values shaped their investment journeys.

Through circle gatherings, guided storytelling, and embodied exercises, we “harvested” learning as a living archive of wisdom — one that acknowledged barriers to financial access while also amplifying confidence, sovereignty, and connection to community wealth.

This approach ensured that financial literacy was not taught in abstraction, but grounded in lived experience, relational accountability, and the shared goal of economic rematriation.