The Improving Reach Bursary scheme for work with smaller voluntary and community sector groups and social enterprises – what has been going on? 

Background

In spring 2007 The Evaluation Trust set up a bursary scheme to give small, under-funded groups, free access to its evaluation and performance mentoring, training, advice and consultancy services to help them plan and manage change and improvement in their organisations. The Bursary was funded by part of the Trust’s Improving Reach grant awarded by Capacity Builders at the end of 2006.

The funding was until March 31^st 2008 but the Trust will continue to deliver planned training and bespoke consultancy projects under this funding  until the end of June 2008.

The Trust has strongly encouraged the participation of service users, volunteers, trustees, staff and partner organisations in this work. It aimed to support organisations to carry out monitoring and evaluation in a manner that is both effective and within their resources, so that evaluation and organisational improvement becomes an integral part of how organisations work.

The scheme offered:

• Training in using tools for self-evaluation and performance improvement.

• Consultancy with ideas, information and support with monitoring success.

• Mentoring links with more experienced individuals or groups

• Signposting towards local and national support networks

Help and advice either online or by telephone 

The scheme is aimed primarily at groups whose annual turnover was £80,000 or less and targeted at the following groups:

• Black and minority ethnic groups (B and ME)
• Refugee and migrant groups
• Faith based groups
• Isolated rural groups

Under the bursary scheme, the Trust has worked with 14 organisations delivering bespoke projects (a further 25 organisations have attended training and numerous others benefited from advice and signposting with more sessions planned); these include nine B & ME organisations, two refugee groups, and three isolated rural groups.

The projects have been very varied including:

• Work with an established and growing, largely B & ME elders group to help them design questions and select tools, in order to gain feedback from members so that they can be more responsive to changing needs. They now have a folder and suggested timetable for monitoring and evaluation activities that can be used at any time.

• Work with an organisation that supports families in rural Dorset who have children with disabilities and aim to offer support and a voice. The Trust’s work has involved signposting sources of support for training young people in the use of film/DVD for use in presenting evaluation outcomes; and exploring creative and workable evaluation tools with staff, trustees and volunteers and training in effective evaluation.

• Work with a Refugee Support group in Bristol to facilitate revisiting and revising their aims and objectives; gain understanding of self–evaluation methods and tools; creating an evaluation framework and to planning in evaluation over the coming year, incorporating this into their new business plan.

• Work with a young social enterprise in Bristol who provide quality accommodation to tenants with additional needs or who are vulnerable, and who also provide service-user focused research and consultancy. The Trust supported the organisation in evaluating their current position, and in capacity building and planning for the future. The work involved mentoring them through a business planning process.

• Work with a Racial Equality Council (REC) in the region to develop an evaluation framework for a range of their work. Five groups who were known to the REC were initially to access mentoring / participate in training together, but their different needs and availability prevented this. The work evolved into a number or separate projects with five groups.

The Evaluation Trust is now working with a further 4 projects including a community health project in Torpoint, The Black Development Agency in Bristol, Fata He in Plymouth, and a community advice and information project in Somerset.

The bursary scheme has funded training sessions in ‘Skills for Effective Evaluation’ in Taunton, Somerset and Kennet with further sessions planned in Bristol and Plymouth between April and June. A number or these sessions are offered in partnership with Vista (Somerset), the Black Development Agency (Bristol) and Voscur (Bristol). Advice and signposting via telephone, email and our updated web site has been ongoing to a wide range of organisations.

Some feedback from people in the organisations worked with has included: 

'you have brought a fresh perspective, provided by someone outside the organisation as we were too close to the work’  

‘Interesting, empowering, lively, relevant and friendly’ 

‘it pushed us into getting things out of our heads onto paper’  ‘what would help is to have a follow-up, after we have had a chance to try evaluation ourselves’ 

‘it helped to clarify our respective roles as partners … to go forward on the basis of thought through plans not as in some cases vague hopes and expectations’ 

‘there are ways into evaluation that I hadn’t appreciated – it now feels do-able’ 

‘it helped us to be clear about what our strengths are’ 

Key Learning Points: 

• The importance and the difficulty of full, mutually satisfying involvement of service users in this (evaluation) process (participant).
• Start small, be realistic, prioritise but get something done as soon as possible (participant).
• It can be challenging for people to commit to evaluation work even following a thorough assessment of their readiness to engage; you can only ask a certain amount of time from volunteers and service users (Trust worker).
• Lack of action between meetings with the group made me question how seriously they were taking it, whether they wanted me to do the work for them and tell them the outcome, and how much they will continue to do without my ‘checking up’ on progress! (Trust worker).
• The time span for the bespoke work often stretches beyond that planned due to limited resources within small groups even when they are committed to the process. This makes continuity and application of learning more challenging and can cause time-tabling issues for workers (Trust workers).
• The initial publicity for the Bursary was rushed and the message too complex. This has been addressed by getting a PR expert to revise the information material and through using Trust workers throughout the region to offer outreach sessions to promote the scheme, usually piggy-backing on other community events and working through local infrastructure agencies and funders (scheme manager).
• It has been difficult to attract faith-based groups to take up the opportunities available through the bursary scheme even with promotion through the main faith infrastructure organisations in the region. The Trust has not had the resources to investigate this further (scheme manager).

The Future:

Following a slow start, the bursary scheme is now well established and feedback from organisations worked with has been positive. In future the Trust would like to continue to offer free services to small groups under a bursary scheme and has applied for further Improving Reach funding from Capacity-Builders. We will know the outcome of our bid in late May. If we are able to offer a continuing Bursary scheme we will make some changes in the light of experiences during the first operational year of the scheme:

o    build in ‘check-up/mentoring’ visits/calls to the organisations worked with several months following the initial evaluation/performance improvement projects or training to offer support with implementation

o    simplify the administration system

o    run a series of outreach sessions across the region, in partnership with other infrastructure organisations to promote the benefits of the work to small organisations, possibly with input from people in organisations that we have already worked with

o    set up a regional network of mentors/advisers among people in organisations worked with

Maria Clarke

SW Projects Manager

The Evaluation Trust

TRAINING NEWS 

The Evaluation Trust is running three training sessions on Skills for Evaluation between April and June

• With Voscur at Symes Avenue District Centre, Hartcliffe Bristol on April 30th:  trainers will be Maria Clarke (Evaluation Trust) and Sabrina Lee (Voscur) – bookings taken until April 21st.  More information and a booking form can be found at http://www.voscur.org/training/monfe08

With the Black Development Agency at BDA premises, Bristol on May 27th:  trainers will be Maria Clarke and BDA trainer to be confirmed and bookings will be taken up to May 16.  For further information please contact Maria Clarke (see contact information below) or for booking contact Charlene at The Black Development Agency charlene@blackdeva.org.uk

on 5^th June at Plymouth Community Partnership;  for more information Telephone Maria Clarke, SW Projects Manager on 0117 904 2636 or Pat Diango, SW Administator on 0117 902 9656;  email: maria_evaluationtrust@blueyonder.co.uk / patdiango@blueyonder.co.uk