IAIA CEO Gary Baker sat down with long-time IAIA member Ilse Aucamp, recipient of the 2025 award for Outstanding Service to IAIA. Ilse was selected for this award for her dedication to expanding long-term capacity building in impact assessment and for creating the IAIA Professional Development Program’s Social Impact Assessment course, recruiting and training mentors, and mentoring participants.
Watch the video now (and find the full transcript below).
Gary Baker, IAIA CEO: Hello, again. I'm Gary Baker, and we are here to meet one of our award recipients this year. The award this time is the Outstanding Service Award, which is a very special award that is given by the Board of IAIA to someone who has really gone far beyond the sort of normal cause of being a volunteer or member of IAIA. I am very, very happy and delighted to welcome Ilse Aucamp on the video today. Ilse, many, many congratulations for your award. Many people know you from your years in IAIA, but for those who don't, please tell us a little bit about your background and how you have ended up sitting here today being interviewed by me.
Ilse Aucamp, Outstanding Service to IAIA Award Recipient: Thank you, Gary. Well, my background is actually a social worker by profession, and that's how I started my career. But then I drifted into the environmental field and decided I'll join my passion for people with my passion for the environment, and that's how I ended up working in this field. My first IAIA conference was in Washington many, many years ago. I didn't know anyone there; I was a student. I remember I shared a room with a little lady called Cynthia, and there I first met all the great names that I had only read about, especially the social impact assessment people. They were so special and warm and welcoming, and they immediately -- I need to mention Frank and SIA -- made me a part of the community and just pulled me in. So through the years, I do social impact assessment because I'm passionate about people and that development should be fair. So with the input of Frank, we did the SIA Guidance Document. And from that, the SIA course -- we started the online course. But it took quite a while to get that done, although we had this guidance document. I'm very happy that I get the award, but there was lots of people behind the scenes that that worked hard, like people from Headquarters, and also I had some volunteers that helped me writing the modules. Now that the course is online, we have people that are mentors -- and I think we have the best mentors, because people mention it every time there's a course review. The mentors are also people in the social impact assessment field -- they are not academics mostly -- they are practitioners. We just want to grow our community of professionals and also just give that hand out to somebody that I got when I as a youngster joined IAIA.
Gary: It has been a very interesting launch of the course. It's been fantastically popular. In fact, we probably struggle to meet the demand for how many people would like to do this. What do you put that down to? Is it difficult to find these types of courses / content? I know it has taken a long time to get together, but why has it been so popular do you think?
Ilse: I think, first of all, it's been a long time coming. Second of all, we really tried to make the course more practical than academic. It is credible -- there's all the readings inside there, and it's really an introduction to social impact assessment. But what I find is many of the people who do the course are experienced people that have done this before. But what they all say is the difference is definitely in the mentoring and in the more practical approach -- that we try to give people tools that they can use in practice. Also, I'm from South Africa, and in many of the developing and less-developed countries, it's difficult to access any training. There are trainings available in Europe and the UK, but it's quite expensive, and it's not accessible to people from everywhere. I think that's also what makes our cause special, because we try to keep it simple, to get just the basics in there, because it's such a wide field. But I really think it's because we aimed it at the people doing the work at the grassroots level.
Gary: What would be the targets now? For someone taking that course, what happens next? Is it all about then just putting it into practice and really learning by doing? Or where do you see that in social impact assessment?
Ilse: I think what is also nice about the course and the mentorship program is that we encourage the participants to keep in contact with their mentor. And this hasn't happened yet, but we are thinking of setting up events where everyone of the past courses can join, and we can just talk shop. So the idea is, I don't think you will be able to do a social impact assessment after the course -- it's like when you have freshly graduated from university, you have the knowledge but you still have to practice it. The course gives people the tools to know what to look for. We have had some people who are authorities that did the course, and we have had some people from bigger consultancies. They say, "we just want to have a similar approach from all our people -- so I'm the leader and taking this course, and I want to put all my people through this course." So I think the idea is that this is really an introduction and just the basics. Each mentor has a few mentees, so we also try to grow that community and encourage them to be part of the Social Impact Assessment Hub, which is also a brainchild and a baby of IAIA, which is another of our networking opportunities. We want to encourage people to start trying their hand at it in the field, but it is still a specialist study and you need certain background knowledge. But we are also trying to be there for them so that they just know who to call or who to ask if they get stuck.
Gary: You mentioned the sort of specialist knowledge that's required or needed, but presumably there are some foundational principles in terms of engagement -- in terms of how you go about trying to engage with local communities --that really have very wide reach across all sorts of disciplines, both in impact assessment but outside, as well.
Ilse: Yes, that is true. For instance, one of our practicals is an interview -- we have a case study, and then you have to imagine someone, like a village chief or somebody that you will interview, to try and practice those skills. We also find that there are people who are not social impact assessment practitioners but are in the broader environmental field, and they just want to have a better background to understand what is the study about and so on. The other thing that's amazing about doing this kind of course with IAIA is that (I know I sound like a marketing pamphlet!) there's so many resources available. It's the quick tips in "FasTips" and these guidance documents that are translated in different languages and so on. And some of our mentors do speak different languages, so we want to keep that door open and maybe get more people that can speak, for example, Spanish or Chinese -- that if there's somebody -- because many of the people are second language speakers like ourselves, so we want them to feel comfortable and say, "Okay, I can just try -- nobody is going to make fun of me or laugh at me." But definitely there are skills that you can use beyond social impact assessment. Some of it is also just good practice.
Gary: I totally agree with you. I think that need for encouraging that multilingual aspect, that's certainly a big aim for us going forward -- to keep widening that net and that ecosystem and the community of social impact assessment. So maybe one final question. For someone setting off in this world of social impact assessment, I'm sure it can be pretty confusing. What would be one word of advice or one sentence of advice for someone setting off or contemplating this as a career?
Ilse: I would say reach out. Reach out to people that you know do social impact assessment. We have our SIA Hub; it's on LinkedIn, as well. I find the SIA community is amazing. They've been amazing to me. I have now friends in every continent made through this community. If somebody said, "Can you recommend somebody that can do SIA here and here?" Then I can connect them because of the networks that I have. So I would say your network is important, and reach out -- don't be don't be intimidated. What I often see is people say, "Oh, but so-and-so is such a big name -- they've published so much." But if you contact them, they are amazing, and they will reply to you, and they will make you part of the community -- because we preach what we practice in the SIA world. So reach out and just do a bit of reading. There's so much information.
Gary: That is brilliant and a really good summary and advice. I would like to thank you for the work that you've done. It is recognized in the award -- it really is outstanding service. So thanks, again, and I look forward to what happens next, and keep pushing on in this area. Thanks, Ilse.
Ilse: Thank you. I'm honored to have the award, and just watch the SIA space -- we are far from done.
