social value essay

50 Social Values Examples

Social values refer to the values of a society or social group . These are the values that keep the society functioning and cohesive.

Often, social values are inherent in a society’s social contract – a set of agreed-upon values and virtues that make the members of the society feel as if fairness and justice are delivered.

Social values tend to be confused with cultural values. While the two overlap, social values are usually more related to a set of expectations around citizenship or group membership (such as ‘obey the law’ or ‘be polite’) while cultural values represent the customs and traditions of your cultural group (such as ‘modesty’ or ‘honor thy father’).

Social Values Examples

Harmony is a social value because it represents a fundamental value necessary in order for a society to remain functional and cohesive. Without it, we may experience some degree of anarchy.

With harmony, we can maintain a peaceful and cooperative social environment where people can get on their lives unimpeded, so long as everyone adheres to this value.

To achieve and maintain social harmony, there is often both a right and responsibility: a right to live in peace, but also a responsibility to be peaceful yourself, so you don’t break the social harmony.

Example of Harmony In a workplace, harmony could be achieved by promoting open communication, resolving conflicts in a respectful and fair manner, and creating a culture that values each individual’s contribution.

2. Fairness

To be fair is to try to be impartial in the way you treat other people, trying to avoid prejudice, bias, or discrimination against or toward any individual.

The benefit of fairness is that it will lead to other key values of a society, like harmony and democracy. As a result, we often see fairness as what sociologists call an instrumental value – a value that helps unlock other deeper values that are important to us. greater social harmony and a general sense of justice in the world.

On a social level, fairness might mean that everyone gets a fair trial rather than being persecuted without a chance to defend your innocence.

On a personal level, fairness can look like taking turns in a game, sharing with others, or obeying the rules even when you lose.

Example of Fairness A judge who acts with fairness will make decisions in the court room based on facts and evidence. They may be required to distribute resources in a way that they judge to be most fair to the most people (such as in a divorce dispute) or they may have to decide what is a fair punishment for a crime.

3. Civic Duty

Civic Duty is the responsibility of a citizen to contribute to their society. This social value is exercised when someone volunteers, votes, or sits on a jury duty.

In democracies, civic duty is a core feature of active citizenship. It requires us to participate in public affairs such as voting and following the law. But some particularly patriotic members of a society may go above and beyond in their civic duty by serving as a police officer, nurse, firefighter, or soldier. Standing for public office is also considered an act of civic duty.

However, in most societies, the core civic duty which is often unavoidable (if called up) is jury duty.

Civic Duty Example Serving on a jury is one of the most important patriotic civic duties that a citizen can perform. It is an opportunity to help ensure that justice is served, and to play a role in upholding the rule of law.

4. Privacy and Property Rights

Respecting the privacy and property of others is a value in most societies. It refers to the importance of not intervening in others’ lives and restricting their rights as a private citizen.

The right to privacy, for example, can be reflected in the social responsibility we have to not pry or interrupt, and even on an individual level, not gossip about others.

Respecting private property would be reflected in the responsibility not to steal or trespass, but it is also a moral value in the sense that when we find something like a wallet on the street, we should continue to respect the fact that this is not ours and we should return it to the owner.

Private property rights are generally a social value in most societies, perhaps with the exception of a pure communist world.

Example of Respect for Privacy An instance of respecting privacy could be refraining from reading someone else’s personal messages or emails without their consent, even if you have access to them.

5. Democracy

Democratic values are a wide range of values that cohere around the idea that a society should be governed by consent of the people – genreally reflected by a ballot in which people vote on issues or select representatives.

While there are many forms of democracy , democratic values are underpinned by this sense that there should be no ‘ruler for life’. Rather, we all get an equal say in whether something should or should not happen.

Democratic values can also extend to social concepts like liberty (all people are free to live their lives without undue influence from others), equality (nobody is better than anyone else), and justice (everyone should follow the law, and lawbreakers should face fair judgment).

As a social value, democracy may also emphasize the importance of everyone’s right to express their views (freedom of speech) and participate in decision-making processes (as in direct democracy ).

Example of Democracy The most obvious example example of democracy is voting. But another example could be being allowed to stand up and say what you believe even if it’s a minority viewpoint.

6. Respect for Others

Respect refers to treating everyone with dignity , even if you don’t agree with them.

To be respectful, we would aim to treat people the way we would want to be treated and not violate their rights, interests, or personal space.

Being respectful is often most important when we disagree with someone else or are in conflict with them. In those situations, we need to remember that we need to always treat everyone – no matter who they are – with respect. Here, we can see that respect is also a moral value.

Example of Respect A simple everyday example of respect is waiting your turn in a line. This, generally, is a western conception of respectfulness. For example, I recall in Thailand getting very mad at all the loclas pushing in-front in a line-up to get tickes, and I realized they didn’t consider this to be disrespectful in their society – each society has different values!

Honesty is the virtue of truthfulness, sincerity, and straightforwardness. Most societies see this as an important value that maintains decorum within a society.

For example, by expecting everyone in society to speak the truth to one another, we can then engage in trade and social interactions with a degree of security and safety that we wouldn’t have if this were not a core value of the society.

As with many values, this differs from one society to another. For example, societies rife with corruption cannot trust the police to behave honestly and impartially, and they may even expect you to give them money to make the problem go away.

Example of Honesty If you accidentally break an item in a shop, honesty would entail you admitting your mistake to the shopkeeper and offering to pay for the damage, rather than hiding it or blaming someone else.

8. Compassion

Compassion occurs when we feel sympathy for people when they are struggling or hurt, and often, it means we will be inclined to help out others in our society.

This is a social value because a compassionate society will take care of other members of our social group. This may mean as a society agreeing to provide aid and housing to the homeless, healthcare to the sick, and so on, even if those people cannot afford it.

On a personal level, it may mean donating to an important cause or helping your neighbor when they are in need.

The more compassionate a society, the more likely we’ll find that either the individuals or social organizations will care for those in need.

Example of Compassion If you see someone crying, you may feel a reflexive feeling that you want to give that person a hug. Here, you’re expressing a base feeling of compassion for your fellow citizen.

Justice refers to fairness based on a moral, political, or ideological worldview.

But there are many different ways of thinking about justice and how it can be delivered in a society, meaning it’s a value that differs across different societies.

For example, some societies highly value retributive justice, which involves taking vengeance on offenders and punishing them harshly to both harm the offender and deter others from also offending.

Other societies value restorative justice , where the offender must make amends to the victims and community, and may have to go through rehabilitation before being returned to the community.

Of course, on an individual level, justice may look a lot like fairness – e.g. ensuring everyone gets equal turns on the sports pitch.

Example of Justice In a sports team, a coach showing justice would give all players an equal opportunity to demonstrate their skills and contribute to the game, rather than favoring a select few. If a rule is broken, the coach would take appropriate action regardless of who broke it.

10. Cooperation

Cooperation is the process of working together respectfully with common interests or goals.

On a broad social level, cooperation is important because it ensures society is harmonious and social interactions go smoothly.

Societies of all stripes generally value cooperation out of acknowledgment that by working together, we all benefit – such as by finishing a job faster or ensuring an event is run smoothly.

Example of Cooperation As a cooperative citizen, you might offer to pitch in and help people if you see that a car is attempting to get out if a tight parking spot.

List of Social Values (A to Z)

• Adaptability
• Authenticity
• Community Involvement
• Cooperation
• Environmental Stewardship
• Forgiveness
• Health and Wellness
• Mindfulness
• Perseverance
• Reliability
• Respect for Diversity
• Respect for Law and Order
• Respect for Privacy
• Responsibility
• Self-discipline
• Self-Improvement
• Service to Others
• Trustworthiness

Remember that different societies have different social values.

Social vs Cultural vs Moral Values

Social, cultural, and moral values are overlapping concepts and you’ll find that one value could fit under all three categories.

However, there are some key differences:

• Social values: Social values represent the values of a social group – an organized group of individuals brought together by shared interests. 
• Cultural values : A society has many cultures in it – e.g Canada is a multicultural society . So, cultural values are more specific to a group of people with shared customs, traditions, and belief systems – i.e. western culture or Aboriginal culture .
• Moral values : are any values that represent right and wrong, good and bad. They are often based upon a coherent moral framework that stems from religious texts, philosophy, or cultural lore.

(Go deeper: Society vs Culture )

Here is a table that compares these three types of values:

Of course, these categories can and do overlap significantly – a bit like a venn diagram. For example, the dominant culture in a society tends to shape social values. Similarly, many cultures are oriented around a specific religious tradition, so the culture itself has its own set of moral values.

Social values refer to the set of values that a specific society (distinct from a culture ) generally agrees upon. Different societies will have different values, although some values do tend to be shared by most societies – such as cooperation and fairness.

One interesting way to differentiate between different societies with different values is to compare western and eastern societies, which are often differentiated by differing foci – for more on this, I recommend reading my piece on individualism versus collectivism next .

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ What is Educational Psychology?
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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Values of Life — My Personal Values in Life

My Personal Values in Life

• Categories: Values of Life

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Published: Jan 31, 2024

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Table of contents

Introduction, body paragraph 1: personal value 1, body paragraph 2: personal value 2, body paragraph 3: personal value 3, counterargument.

• Adler, M. J. (2000). The four dimensions of philosophy: Metaphysical, moral, objective, categorical. Routledge.
• Miller, W. R., & Thoresen, C. E. (2003). Spirituality, religion, and health: An emerging research field. American Psychologist, 58(1), 24-35.
• Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. Oxford University Press.

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What is Social Value?: A Discussion Paper

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Measuring Social Impact

Measuring social value.

Funders, nonprofit executives, and policymakers are very enthusiastic about measuring social value. Alas, they cannot agree on what it is, let alone how to assess it. Their main obstacle is assuming that social value is objective, fixed, and stable. When people approach social value as subjective, malleable, and variable, they create better metrics to capture it.

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By Geoff Mulgan Summer 2010

Over the last few decades, many people have attempted to measure what is sometimes called social, public, or civic value—that is, the value that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), social enterprises , social ventures, and social programs create. 1 The demand for these metrics has come from all sectors: Foundations want to direct their grants to the most effective programs; public officials, policymakers, and government budget offices have to account for their spending decisions; investors want hard data analogous to measures of profit; and nonprofits need to demonstrate their impact to funders, partners, and beneficiaries. Metrics to meet these needs have proliferated over the last 40 years, resulting in hundreds of competing methods for calculating social value. 2

Despite the enthusiasm for metrics, few people actually use them to guide decisions. In the nonprofit sector, good managers are very rigorous about tracking costs and income. But few use sophisticated metrics to help allocate resources. Meanwhile, in the public sector, political judgment counts more than cost-benefit assessments. In the rare cases when decision makers do use metrics of social value , it’s far from clear that they should.

I’ve dealt with social value metrics in a variety of roles: as director of policy and strategy under United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair; as director of the Young Foundation, an NGO that has created dozens of ventures, some for-profit, some social enterprises, and some public; and as an advisor to many other governments. In these positions, I’ve seen not only why social value metrics are ignored, but also how to make them more useful.

One recent project that proved particularly informative was a collaboration between the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) and the Young Foundation. The NHS commissioned the Young Foundation to develop a practical tool for assessing service innovations and guiding investment decisions. The NHS is a vast organization with a budget of around $150 billion, a workforce of some 1.2 million employees, and contracts with more than 30,000 social enterprises. It needed a set of tools that would be both robust and flexible, and that could be used for decision making as well as evaluation.

We started by scanning existing social value metrics, such as the ones described in the table “10 Ways to Measure Social Value” on page 41. We found hundreds of competing tools, of which foundations and NGOs generally use one set, governments another, and academics yet another. In addition to discovering this segmentation, our survey suggested two more reasons why so few metrics guide real decisions. First, most metrics assume that value is objective, and therefore discoverable through analysis. Yet as most modern economists now agree, value is not an objective fact. Instead, value emerges from the interaction of supply and demand, and ultimately reflects what people or organizations are willing to pay. Because so few of the tools reflect this, they are inevitably misaligned with an organization’s strategic and operational priorities.

The second reason that current measures of social value fail to influence decision makers is that they conflate three very different roles: accounting to external stakeholders, managing internal operations, and assessing societal impact. In the business sector, decision makers use different tools for each of these tasks. An airplane manufacturer, for instance, would use one set of metrics, mandated by laws and regulations, to explain to external stakeholders how it spends its money. The company would then use a second set of metrics to allocate resources in the building of airplanes. (It is a brave manager who would let investors see these internal accounts.) The company would then use entirely different kinds of measures to explain how its activities affect larger economic indicators such as gross domestic product.

Yet in the social and public sectors, some proponents of new social value measures claim that their metric can play all three roles. Not surprisingly, and despite courageous efforts, these attempts to do three things at once have resulted in the failure to do any one of them well.

Here, I describe a better way to think about social value: the product of the dynamic interaction between supply and demand in the evolution of markets for social value. I then show how decision makers in the nonprofit and public sectors can use these insights to measure what can be measured without pretending to measure what can’t be. Finally I recommend better ways to make social value metrics. My main advice is that nonprofits and foundations should resist the current trend of developing assessment tools entirely separately from public policy and academic social science, and instead should collaborate across sectors.

Elusive Quarry

The failure of the social and public sectors to measure the value they create does not stem from a paucity of intelligence or good intention. Rather, it reflects four unavoidable complexities that bedevil the measurement of social value. First among these is the lack of hard-and-fast laws and regularities in the social field. Many people would love the social field to be more like natural science, so that they could definitely predict the effects of, say, a $10 million investment in a crime prevention program.

But unlike molecules, which follow the rules of physics rather obediently, human beings have minds of their own, and are subject to many social, psychological, and environmental forces. Several decades of involvement in evidence-based policymaking has shown me that although evidence should inform all action, very few domains allow precise predictions about what causes will lead to what effects. The social sciences (including business) simply do not have laws in the way that physics has. Even seemingly solid economic principles, such as the rule that demand falls when prices rise, have many exceptions.

A second reason that measuring social value is hard is that, in many of the most important fields of social action—such as crime prevention, childcare, and schooling—people do not agree about what the desired outcome should be. In other words, the public argues not only about social value, but also about social values. For example, many people want to imprison criminals to punish them, even when incarceration costs more and confers fewer benefits than do alternatives to prison. Psychologists call this willingness to sacrifice a lot to penalize others altruistic punishment.

Because people’s ethics, morals, and priorities vary, social value assessments that look only at costs and benefits are bound not to influence many members of the public and the politicians who represent them. Philosophers (from John Dewey to Luc Boltanski) have long recognized that societies are made up of competing and conflicting systems of valuation and justification. But measurers of social value have often tried to deny this.

Even without these problems, many social value metrics are inherently unreliable. Measurements of social return on investment (SROI), for example, often quite arbitrarily estimate costs and paybacks, which dramatically affects the final calculated value. SROI calculations can help in broad-stroke predictions, but they can’t help with finer-grained decisions.

Revealed preference and stated preference methods are also notoriously unreliable. Although they try to provide precise numbers, they are not very rigorous about the means of deriving these numbers. As a result, these methods confuse rigor with precision—a point that REDF and others in the SROI field increasingly recognize.

A final reason that measuring social value is difficult is the problem of time—estimating how much good an action will bring about many years in the future, relative to how much it will cost to implement it now. In predictions of commercial returns on investment (ROI), businesspeople use discount rates to account for the assumption that a given amount of money will be worth less in the future than it is in the present. With a 5 percent discount rate, for example, $100 of today’s money will be worth only $35.85 in 30 years, and only $7.69 in 50 years. Many current measures of social value, such as SROI, likewise use commercial discount rates—perhaps because of a mistaken belief that treating social discount rates as equal to commercial ones will make social value metrics seem more rigorous.

But it’s not clear why social organizations and governments should use commercial discount rates, especially as these rates radically devalue the future. Indeed, we should hope that the people in these organizations give greater weight to the interests of future generations than do commercial markets. A closer analysis of discount rates suggests that they do. 3 In health, many countries apply a very low or zero discount rate, on the grounds that younger generations should not be disadvantaged relative to older ones. Governments ignore discount rates when investing in education and defense technologies. And in climate change policy, a furious debate has raged about what discount rates to apply—again in part a moral argument about how to weigh the needs of future generations against the needs of current ones. These examples reflect my broader point: Social value is not an objective fact. Instead, it emerges from the interaction of supply and demand, and therefore may change across time, people, places, and situations.

Constructing Value

Borrowing practices from business and economics has led to many mistakes in the measurement of social value. Yet these fields still offer some important lessons for the field of social innovation. For much of human history, philosophers and economists believed that value was an objective fact. Aristotle thought that there was a “just price” for everything, for instance. And Karl Marx thought that value came from labor.

But more recently, most economists have accepted that the only meaningful concept of value is that it arises from the interaction of demand and supply in markets. In other words, something is valuable only if someone is willing to pay for it. This blunt approach upsets many people because it implies that there may be no economic value in a beautiful sunset, an endangered species, or a wonderful work of art. But this definition of value is useful because it forces economists to observe real behavior, rather than trying to uncover hidden realities.

The time is ripe for the social field to take an equally simple starting point, and to view social value as arising from the interplay of what I call effective demand and effective supply. Effective demand means that someone is willing to pay for a service or an outcome. That “someone” may be a public agency, a foundation, or individual citizens. Effective supply means that the service or outcome works, is affordable, and is implementable. I use the qualifier “effective” because social problems will always invite simple supply and simple demand. But to measure social value, the supplies and demands must be effective in the senses described above.

Markets, conversations, and negotiations then link, on the one hand, people and organizations with needs and resources, with, on the other hand, people and organizations with solutions and services. Social value metrics are useful if they give shape to these markets, conversations, and negotiations.

In some fields, the links between supply and demand are mature. For example, many voters are willing to pay taxes for police forces and primary schools, and many governments are able to supply these services. Likewise, many donors are willing to fund health care for children in developing countries, and many local charities and churches are able to deliver this care. In these domains, analyzing social value is not difficult, because the links between what funders want and what providers know they can offer is clear.

But for other social issues, the links between supply and demand are missing. In some cases, effective demand may be lacking because funders, politicians, or private citizens do not view a need as pressing enough to warrant their resources. For example, some states are unwilling to fund sex education or drug treatment. In other cases, effective demand may be present—for instance, many governments are willing to pay to reduce obesity—but the supply of cost-effective interventions is limited. In these situations any descriptions of social value are bound to be more tentative and exploratory.

In still other cases, both sides of the supply-demand equation may be murky or complex. Many social policy makers, for instance, understand that more holistic solutions often yield better results. But holistic approaches necessarily have to deal with purchasers—that is, demand—that are split across many different public agencies and NGOs, each with its own view of what really counts as valuable. The supply side may also be fragmented: Helping homeless people, for example, may depend on the contribution of many different agencies to provide therapy, alcohol treatment, job training, and housing. In these fields, too, social value can become clearer only through iterative processes that bring together supply and demand in deliberation and discussion. Even the most brilliant researcher cannot measure or even describe social value if she is not immersed in these discussions.

Healthy Numbers

All of these points have become particularly clear in our work for the NHS, which is involved in everything from routine checkups, to surgeries, to behavior-change interventions, to community programs. The advantage of a single, integrated health service like the NHS is that it has to be explicit about its demands, that is, what it needs and what it is willing to pay for. The NHS’s effective supply side is also reasonably easy to define, and it includes doctors, nurses, managers, social enterprises, private providers, and members of the public.

To help the NHS make better decisions and allocate its resources more effectively, we at the Young Foundation created a tool that makes explicit the social value of various alternatives. Earlier on I described the three very different roles metrics can play—external accountability, internal decision making, and assessment of broader social impact. The tool we developed focuses squarely on the second of these goals. It attempts to capture the value that accrues to the individual from being healthy, rather than sick; to caregivers; to the wider community (for example, from the control of infectious diseases); and to the taxpayer.

The tool we created is not a simple computer program or calculator. Instead, it is a framework for thinking about value. Like many of the tools used to assess social value, this one requires a series of judgments. The judgments fall into four main categories: 1) strategic fit (how well the proposed innovation meets the needs of the health service); 2) potential health outcomes (including likely impact on quality-adjusted life years and patient satisfaction); 3) cost savings and economic effects; and 4) risks associated with implementation.

When faced with a proposal, users of the tool apply a 0 to 5 scale to rate the proposal on items in each of these categories. Proposals range from a promising idea from a group of doctors or nurses, to an idea that has already been piloted on a small scale or a venture that is ready for scaling up. Users can also provide commentary along with their ratings.

In some cases, decision makers can draw on strong data—for example, evidence from a randomized controlled trial. In other cases, they must rely on less certain numbers. To capture this variability, the tool also includes measures of the reliability of the evidence on which judgments are based. The visual presentation of the results then makes judgments and their reliability very clear.

Once mastered, the NHS tool is quick to use and transparent. Multiple users can interrogate the judgments, and in due course compare them with what actually happened. It is also publicly available. Ten regional innovation funds (worth around $350 million in total) are using it as a basis for decisions and encouraging applicants to use the tool to assess themselves. Decision makers can also use the tool to review each other’s work, to ensure consistency in their decisions, and to communicate with other public agencies.

The net result of the NHS tool is a picture of social value that is explicit about what’s valued and what isn’t; that doesn’t try to combine everything into a single number; that is transparent and interrogatable; and that is simple enough to help decision makers having to cope with a large volume of examples. It also avoids the flaw of trying to impose a single discount rate onto diverse measurements.

Making Markets

I describe this tool because it is one approach to operationalizing social value that balances coherence, consistency, and simplicity with the flexibility needed to cope with messy and complex phenomena. Developing it was helped by the fact that the NHS is an organization with clear supplies and demands. But for most NGOs, supply and demand are fuzzier, and each field brings with it a different set of concerns.

For example, primary, secondary, and tertiary educational institutions create value for students and the wider society. They rely on a strong research base to decide which types of education deliver which returns to whom. Vocational education, in contrast, presents a different set of considerations. Certain kinds of skill may be of value to only one sector, or to a small set of employers. A program offering intensive support to a chaotic drug user will have a still more complicated set of values, including value for the individual (both financial and health-related), value for the community (for example, from lower crime), as well as value for a wide range of public agencies (from hospitals whose emergency services will be used less, to police, prisons, and welfare agencies).

Seen through this lens, the job of funders is not to alight on one particular method for measuring value. Although common frameworks for thinking about value are useful, funders must adapt these frameworks to the organization and field under consideration.

Indeed, the greatest contribution that funders can make is often not to measure value, but to forge the links between supply and demand that will later generate value. For example, they can invest in effective supply by supporting promising projects and collecting evidence of what works. They can invest in effective demand by persuading governments to use their much greater resources to pay for new services. And they can use their convening power to connect purchasers and providers and then encourage them to talk.

Foundations can also help less powerful players have a voice in the market. Many groups, such as homeless people, migrant workers, and people with mental illnesses, have clear needs but lack the resources and political power to translate their needs into demand. Foundations can turn this latent demand into effective demand. For instance, several European foundations that support undocumented migrants have developed the demand side of this emerging social market by encouraging larger NGOs and public authorities to allocate resources (for example, for housing and health care) to it. On the supply side, these foundations have funded promising projects that are more effective at meeting the needs of this group.

Some foundations are likewise developing the market for addressing elder abuse. On the demand side, they have funded research on the extent of the problem and influenced commissioners to allocate resources and attention to it. On the supply side, they have supported innovative programs to prevent or mitigate abuse.

In both cases, governments’ resources vastly outweigh those of foundations and NGOs. This is almost always the case. Just about anyone wanting to make a big social impact has to engage with the worlds of politics and public provision.

Good Accounts

The field of social innovation can learn some lessons from business and economics. But it should not be naive. As the collapses of Enron and Lehman Brothers revealed, even such seemingly objective metrics as profit are not the facts they appear to be in economics textbooks. And in business, accounts are just that: accounts. They are ways of explaining what is being done, with an eye toward the often conflicting interests of investors, managers, regulators, and consumers. They involve judgments as well as facts.

Anyone who wants to finance social goods and anyone who wants to provide them should use metrics to clarify how inputs can contribute to outcomes, as well as to clarify choices and trade-offs. But they should abandon metrics that obscure these choices or that pretend to offer a spurious objectivity. And they should use metrics only in proportionate ways. It’s not sensible for a small NGO to invest scarce resources in apparently elaborate estimates of social value—not least because these estimates are bound to crumble under serious scrutiny.

Meanwhile, larger NGOs that do need measures of social value should clearly distinguish between those that are primarily about external accountability, those that help internal management, and those that support assessments of broader patterns of social impact. If an organization is using the same method for all three, its findings are almost certainly flawed.

People involved in funding social value, whether at the stage of promising innovations or of large-scale practice, likewise need sharper common frameworks. Greater use of these shared frameworks would be more valuable than proliferation of ever more assessment tools. Building on these frameworks, what matters is the quality of the discussion and negotiation, and the depth of the learning several years later, when participants reflect on what worked and what didn’t.

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Read more stories by Geoff Mulgan .

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Essay on Values for Students and Children

500+ words essay on values.

Importance of Values

For an individual, values are most important. An individual with good values is loved by everyone around as he is compassionate about others and also he behaves ethically.

Values Help in Decision Making

A person is able to judge what is right and what is wrong based on the values he imbibes. In life at various steps, it makes the decision-making process easier. A person with good values is always likely to make better decisions than others.

Values Can Give Direction to Our Life

In life, Values give us clear goals. They always tell us how we should behave and act in different situations and give the right direction to our life. In life, a person with good values can take better charge.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Values Can Build Character

If a person wants a strong character, then he has to possesses good values such as honesty , loyalty, reliability, efficiency, consistency, compassion, determination, and courage. Values always help in building our character.

Values Can Help in Building a Society

If u want a better society then people need to bear good values. Values play an important role in society. They only need to do their hard work, with compassion, honesty, and other values. Such people will help in the growth of society and make it a much better place to live.

Characteristics of Values

Values are always based on various things. While the basic values remain the same across cultures and are intact since centuries some values may vary. Values may be specific to a society or age. In the past, it was considered that women with good moral values must stay at home and not voice their opinion on anything but however, this has changed over time. Our culture and society determine the values to a large extent. We imbibe values during our childhood years and they remain with us throughout our life.

Family always plays the most important role in rendering values to us. Decisions in life are largely based on the values we possess. Values are permanent and seldom change. A person is always known by the values he possesses. The values of a person always reflect on his attitude and overall personality.

The Decline of Values in the Modern Times

While values are of great importance and we are all aware of the same unfortunately people these days are so engrossed in making money and building a good lifestyle that they often overlook the importance of values. At the age when children must be taught good values, they are taught to fight and survive in this competitive world. Their academics and performance in other activities are given importance over their values.

Parents , as well as teachers, teach them how to take on each other and win by any means instead of inculcating good sportsman spirit in them and teaching them values such as integrity, compassion, and patience. Children always look up to their elders as their role models and it is unfortunate that elders these days have a lack of values. Therefore the children learn the same.

In order to help him grow into a responsible and wise human being, it is important for people to realize that values must be given topmost priority in a child’s life because children are the future of the society. There can be nothing better in a society where a majority of people have good values and they follow the ethical norms.

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Home / Essay Samples / Philosophy / Ethics / My Personal And Ethical Values

My Personal And Ethical Values

• Category: Philosophy , Psychology , Life
• Topic: Ethics , Morality , Values

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