Impact assessment (IA) professionals carry a distinctive burden, working in high-stakes, emotionally demanding environments shaped by contested communitycontexts, complex multi-stakeholder processes, and roles that are often misunderstood or undervalued. Yet practitioners’ inner experiences rarely feature in IA training or professional development. This course addresses that gap.

Developed from applied psychological work with environmental and social teams at leading development finance institutions, it brings evidence-based organizational and social psychology frameworks directly to IA practitioners. It is designed for the broader IA community across sectors and career stages, including practitioners, community and stakeholder professionals, decision makers and regulators, and accountability and dispute resolution professionals. The course explores three interconnected themes:

• Role clarity and identity — how ambiguity, conflicting expectations, and gapsbetween self- and peer-perceptions affect team performance and relationships.
• Job demands and resources — balancing sustained work demands with resources that support goal achievement, while developing strategies to prevent burnout and sustain engagement.
• Emotional processing — building individual and collective capacity to recognize, understand, and respond adaptively to emotionally triggering
  experiences inherent to IA work.

Through concise presentations, real-world IA vignettes, individual and group exercises, and peer learning, participants will gain greater insight into their professional experience, practical tools for wellbeing and effectiveness, and a shared language for supporting colleagues and teams.

Level: Beginner

Prerequisites: None

Language: English

Duration: 1 day (18 April)

Min/Max: 8-40

Price: $330

Instructors: Dr. Sérgio Moreira, Learning and SPGrow Manager, Community Insights Group (Portugal) and Francesco Mazzei, Consultant and Business Development Coordinator, Community Insights Group (Canada)

Dr. Sérgio Moreira is a psychologist with extensive experience in applying Social Psychology to improve Social Performance and Project-Community relations. He has worked in diverse development projects spanning the energy production, transportation, and extractive industries. Sérgio co-developed CIG’s social performance competency development instruments called SPGrow, is an invited assistant professor at two business schools in Lisbon – Nova School of Business and Economics where he teaches Research Methods and Applied Data Analysis, and an invited scholar at the Católica School of Business and Economics where he teaches Organizational psychology and has a master seminar on trust on new major infrastructure projects.

He co-led the development and delivery of the SSHRP and contributes to CIG and IFC’s Social Risk and Resettlement course. His module, “the person behind the practice”, examines the experiences, responsibilities, and challenges faced by social performance professionals. Sérgio’s work is published in Frontiers in Psychology, Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, and The Extractive Industries and Society.

Sérgio has a degree in Psychology from the Faculdade de Psicologia da Universidade de Lisboa and a PhD in Social Psychology by the ISCTE Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. Portuguese-born, he currently lives in a traditional neighborhood in Lisbon.

Francesco Mazzei is a Canadian-based social performance and corporate sustainability specialist with over a decade of experience supporting the design and implementation of social impact assessments, health impact assessments, and social performance management systems associated large-scale industrial projects.

Francesco is a consultant and business development coordinator at CIG, where he co-leads the Social Impact Assessment (SIA) and Management and the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and Projects (IPR&P) e-learning programmes delivered in partnership with the University of Strathclyde.

Francesco recently concluded his three-year Board term for the IAIA (2023-2026) and serves on the Conferences Committee. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Geography (Hons), with a specialization in Population Health, from the University of Victoria and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Simon Fraser University.