About
Institutions built to manage work within their own boundaries are now being asked to make progress across whole ecosystems.
Impact Sphere Global helps purpose-driven leaders understand and strengthen what shared work requires, both inside their institutions and across the relationships that surround them.
FOUNDER AND CEO
Heather MacCleoud, PhD
Heather MacCleoud founded Impact Sphere Global after more than two decades of work across higher education, government, nonprofit leadership, international education, and global networks.
Before founding Impact Sphere Global, Heather served as Chief Network Officer for Ashoka U and Global Higher Education Lead for Ashoka. Her work included network strategy, institutional engagement, partnerships, and the role of higher education in advancing changemaking around the world.
Earlier in her career, she held senior roles in international education and state government. She also founded and led mission-driven organizations working in global learning and women’s access to education.
Across these roles, Heather saw institutions take on priorities that required sustained participation far beyond their formal authority. She also saw how easily that work could stall when institutional structures, relationships, and ways of learning weren’t built for shared action.
Impact Sphere Global grew from a sustained effort to understand that challenge and develop practical ways to address it.
Heather holds a PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. Her work brings together institutional strategy, policy, network leadership, organizational learning, and a long-standing commitment to widening meaningful participation in social change.
A developing body of work
Impact Sphere Global is developing a connected body of research and practice called Impact Systems™.
Its core framework, Institutional Impact Architecture™, examines how an institution’s structures and relationships support or constrain shared impact. The Social Impact Operating System™ provides a related way to examine recurring areas of practice, including convening, trust, participation, meaning, learning, and sustainability.
Together, these ideas help leaders look beneath formal strategies and partnership structures to understand how shared work actually operates.
They are developing frameworks, not settled science. Impact Sphere Global uses them to organize inquiry, identify patterns, surface assumptions, and support practical decisions. The Approach page explains them in greater depth.
How Impact Sphere Global Uses evidence
Impact Sphere Global’s current work draws on public-source research examining 65 purpose-driven leaders, qualitative interviews with fifteen leaders of institutional and international networks, synthesis of relevant research and established approaches, and the continued development of practical tools.
These sources help identify recurring patterns and sharpen the questions Impact Sphere Global asks. They don’t establish causality, show how common every pattern is, or prove that the framework transfers equally across sectors and settings.
Impact Sphere Global separates three things carefully:
- What the available evidence supports
- How Impact Sphere Global interprets that evidence
- What Impact Sphere Global recommends that leaders consider
This distinction matters. Purpose-driven leaders need useful guidance, but they also need to know where the evidence ends and professional judgment begins.
Impact Sphere Global’s frameworks support evidence-informed inquiry and action. They aren’t certifications, audits, formal impact evaluations, legal opinions, or guarantees of outcomes.