Learning lessons - and remembering them!

Most of us have expostulated at some time or another about the facet of British organisational culture which means that when someone new takes over the running of something, they have a tendency to disregard what went before. Lessons learned from programmes and initiatives are forgotten or rejected as 'old hat', products of projects - tool-kits, courses, evaluations and so on - lay gathering dust on real or virtual shelves. Everyone starts again from scratch.

We have been evaluating South West Empowering Communities during 2010-11 and are impressed with its innovative approach to counteracting the 'not invented here' tendency.

At tomorrow's 'What We Know and What Next' event (watch online here), we will be talking about the section of our evaluation which brings together some important lessons which Empowering Communities hope that policymakers don't' spend a whole parliament's-worth of time relearning.

We talked to many people during the evaluation, and they told us about the factors and qualities which make for successful empowerment programmes. None of it will be new to anyone involved in the work, but it was felt that it's important to keep restating even the relatively obvious in the hope that time and money aren't wasted in the future.

Because to keep starting again from first principles, as though there were no accumulated knowledge of what works and what doesn't, means that communities' time and energies will be wasted as they are disillusioned by another set of short term initiatives devised by polcymakers starting with a clean slate.

We'll post the key messages from the evaluation on the website after the event - we would be interested to have your comments and additions.

Read the evaluation of the Empowering Communities programme.

Sue Martin and Lesley Wagstaffe

React Consortium