Pathways through Participation is a Big Lottery Fund qualitative research project lead by NCVO in partnership with the Institute for Volunteering Research and Involve. The study ran for two and a half years and the final report has now been published.

The study looked at the ways in which individuals become involved and stay involved in participation over the course of their lives. Focusing on three case study areas (Leeds, Enfield and Suffolk), the research involved in-depth interviews with a range of stakeholders as well as focus groups to discuss earlier research findings. 

The report looked at participation from a broad definition categorising it into social, public and individual participation. The study identified widespread participation with all respondents engaging in some form of participation at some stage in their lives.

The reports three main conclusions were that participation is personal and must be viewed from the perspective of the individual taking part, participation must be encouraged, supported, and made more attractive, and that significant barriers to participation are entrenched.

The final report and a summary of the final report can be read here

Frank Field’s Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances has been published. The review sets out a new approach to end child poverty advocating a greater emphasis on parental support in the earliest years of a child’s life. The review concludes that such is the importance of support and nurture in a child’s early life that the most cost effective way to support young families is through targeted support that begins at conception.  

The review makes two overarching recommendations. The review calls for the establishment of a set of ‘Life Chance Indicators’ to measure the success of making more equal life outcomes for all children. The review also calls for the establishment of the Foundation Years covering conception to age five and forming the first pillar of a new tripartite education system of school and further and higher education.

Click here to read the full report 

Ecorys are pleased to announce that the final evaluation report for Reaching Communities in England and Northern Ireland has now been published.  A range of evaluation evidence sources were used in the research, including programme data from 1,436 projects, feedback from 804 projects via annual surveys, and 37 case study visits.

The evaluation found that overall, Reaching Communities has supported a diverse range of projects to achieve an array of positive outcomes for an extremely broad range of target groups and local communities. Over 50 different types of activity were delivered by the programme ranging from advocacy to artwork; languages to life skills; recycling to respite care and youth diversion to volunteering.

Click here to download the final report

Reaching Communities projects could look at using standardised questions for evaluating your work. Instead of reinventing the wheel, have a look at some of the online question banks which contain hundreds of examples of questions you could use to save you designing your own. Try using a search engine to find some.

There are also lots of ‘standardised scales’ you could use. For example the Warwick Edinburgh mental wellbeing scale  contains sets of questions that you could use t help measure beneficiaries’ wellbeing (and there are many others depending on what area you work in). You could then track your projects’ results aginst other projects’ results.

If you need help finding something more specific email us at reaching.communities@ecotec.com

In our recent Reaching Communities networking event in Birmingham projects expressed an interest in the social return on investment model for measuring the benefits of a project. This is an evaluation technique which projects could use, as it builds on working with stakeholders to identify the financial benefits of a project for making a case to future funders. Projects could look at the approved / accredited method and tools outlined here