Evaluation lessons - Involve local people in projects

Hilary Allsop, a senior consultant at Focus, Regeneration & Renewal, 16 May 2008

Project: Reaching Communities in England and Northern Ireland.

Period of evaluation: 2006 to 2007.

Evaluating organisation: Consultancy Ecotec in conjunction with Boyd Consulting.

Evaluation commissioned by: The Big Lottery Fund.

Aims and outline of project: The Reaching Communities in England and Northern Ireland programme provides funding to projects that aim to improve the health and well-being of people in deprived communities, as well as groups with specific problems such as mental health issues. This report is the first of four commissioned by the Big Lottery Fund, and draws on information collected in the initiative's first year of delivery. The programme runs until 2010 in both England and Northern Ireland.

KEY LESSONS

Hilary Allsop writes: The key lesson to emerge at this early stage in the Reaching Communities programme is that involving local people in the design and management of projects helps to ensure that the schemes are successful, and has the added benefit that local people develop new skills. While relatively few projects have so far involved local people in this way, those that have done so have performed better than those that are devised and managed without the involvement of the community which they seek to help.

The evaluation shows that a high proportion of schemes involve local people in a project's development in some limited way - most commonly in its monitoring and evaluation. However, only a quarter of projects involve local people on equal terms with the project team, and a quarter failed to respond at all to a question on involvement posed by the evaluators. Examples of active involvement include local people helping to recruit project staff or sitting on management committees. The report recommends that further work should be undertaken to promote a greater understanding about the various ways in which local people can become more closely involved in the design and management of projects.

The evaluation also recommends that the Big Lottery Fund attempts to build a deeper understanding of which community involvement strategies are most effective. Greater involvement could then be encouraged by ensuring that examples of effective strategies are circulated between funded projects, the report recommends.

- The Interim Evaluation of Reaching Communities in England and Northern Ireland is available via www.regen.net/doc - Contact us. Do you know of an evaluation report with important lessons for other regeneration professionals? If so, contact Adam Branson on adam.branson@haymarket.com.