Category: Projects

1. Tackling Inequalities Fund evaluation: Working with partners old and new to reduce health inequalities across Lincolnshire

   Posted on 12:00pm Tuesday 14th Jun 2022

   

   In April 2020, Sport England launched the Tackling Inequalities Fund (TIF) to make £20m of National Lottery funding available to support community groups in maintaining connections and physical activity opportunities in the recovery from Covid-19. The TIF also intended to support those disproportionately affected by Covid-19 and prevent the inequalities gap from widening due to falling activity levels. As part of a larger evaluation, ROC Research Consultancy conducted a short evaluation of TIF in Lincolnshire to understand how partners are working together to tackle health inequalities. 

    

   Active Lincolnshire have been working with existing partners, and many new partners to support their applications to Sport England’s TIF. With an over 80% application success rate, £248,000 was distributed to a wide variety of projects aimed at helping people be more physically active. Through the evaluation, we learnt that key to the success of TIF was the way that Active Lincolnshire work with partners, and how are partners work with them. Active Lincolnshire had a great understanding of the physical activity opportunities and barriers across Lincolnshire, and worked hard to develop really strong relationships with partners. Active Lincolnshire also highly valued partners’ deep understanding of the communities and networks they worked with. This knowledge enabled Active Lincolnshire to work collaboratively with partners to make high quality, but realistic applications to TIF with an emphasis sustainable physical activity opportunities. A by-product of the collaborative approach were connections with new partners across Lincolnshire who were interested in working in the same way to develop and lead new and innovative approachs to tackling health inequality through physical activity. 

    

   Click here to read full report and summary report. 

2. An embedded evaluator approach with Change Nottingham’s Community of Practice

   Posted on 12:00pm Thursday 14th Apr 2022

   In 2021, against the backdrop of the unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, ROC Research Consultancy was commissioned by Small Steps Big Changes to evaluate the journey of a virtual Community of Practice (CoP). The aim was to improve the system for people experiencing severe multiple disadvantage, deprivation, and health inequalities from birth to later in life in Nottingham. Change Nottingham pooled resources and enthusiasm, and an drew together a diverse range of partners for a series of virtual workshops to explore how to build a coordinated systemic approach to collaboration around this issue. Dr Rebecca O’Connor explored the implementation of the CoP from its inaugural meeting in February 2021 through to the fourth CoP in July 2021.

   By embedding herself within the CoP planning group, Rebecca codesigned the evaluation approach with partners. With a purely qualitative approach, CoP planners and participants were interviewed throughout the evaluation period to collate multiple perspectives and understand the value of the CoP. Findings were fed back rapidly to the planning group to help inform decision making as the CoP progressed and evolved. Learning that emerged helped to clarify the purpose of the CoP and understand how to engage and maintain engagement. It highlighted the importance of building relationships and nurturing networks when encouraging collaborative working between different types of partners.

   Evaluation played an important role in understanding the complexity of a CoP and allowed the voice of the participants to be added to the planning conversation. While this sometimes challenges the agenda of those involved in planning and facilitating a collaborative work stream, it has the potential to enhance engagement and collective ownership of collective systems thinking. If you are interested in learning more about an embedded evaluator approach, please contact Dr Rebecca O’Connor who will be very happy to discuss it with you further.