Evaluating Empowerment

As the evaluators of the South West Empowering Communities Programme for 2010-11, we would like to use the blog to introduce ourselves. We have been commissioned to carry out an evaluation which will answer the following questions:

• What has been the impact of Empowering Communities - on communities themselves, on public authorities and on the interaction between them?
• What has been learned about empowerment?
• What might be done in the future to maximise impact?

We also undertook the 2009-10 evaluation of the programme, working with the Regional Empowerment Partnership to ensure that the evaluation process was as interactive as possible, whilst keeping the objectivity that allowed lessons to be learned for the future. This year our brief is to collect evaluative evidence which will contribute to the Empowerment Works legacy project, to support the Partnership to reflect on progress, challenges and critical success factors, and to develop an overview and summary of the whole four years of the South West Empowerment Programme. This regional evaluation will complement a national evaluation.

Our work will involve interviewing people involved in various capacities with Empowering Communities; some small scale survey work; attendance at events, and involvement with an event in February currently being planned - details to be confirmed shortly.

We plan to use the blog to keep people up to date with our work. Meanwhile, if you would like to contact us regarding the evaluation, please do so. We would be very interested to hear stories about the impact of the work, and about particular successes from activity which was supported through the empowerment programme.

Sue Martin and Lesley Wagstaffe, React Consultancy

Contact us at: martinsue@blueyonder.co.uk