This is a video interview, with Kirsty Rose Parker, founder and director of The Evaluator in conversation with Surrey County Council discussing an evaluation. Our thanks go to Daniel Murray, and Patricia Huertas from Surrey County Council for agreeing to be filmed for this case study.
When you hear Ancient Egypt for Modern Times, what do you think of? We thought of pyramids, and mummies and actually the whole of Egyptian Culture. We have loved evaluating this project around connecting modern people to ancient themes. This project aims to take the whole of that culture and make it relevant now. Of particular poignancy is how people have coped with tough times, and bereavement throughout the generations, which is timely given the last few years.
The Evaluator is delighted to be working the Manchester Museum team to understand the impact of their project, which includes an inter-generational project working across schools and care homes and an online project, of which more is below.
The official project description is:
To Have and to Heal is a unique new arts and wellbeing programme, supporting Covid recovery and resilience, which explores Manchester Museum’s World Class Egyptology collection and popular fascination with ancient Egypt. Sessions provide a safe space to share responses to and personal reflections of experiences of the pandemic.
Participating groups are invited to explore a chosen theme, through which discussion and reflections are shared in relation to the objects and the personal experiences they may connect with. Themes range from Magical Healing and Touch, to Loss and The Meaning of Art.
The interactive online programme includes real time engagement and Q & A with the Museum’s Curator of Egypt and Sudan, showcases high quality digital images of rarely seen objects from the collection, together with a behind the scenes virtual visit to the Museum’s storerooms.
The online programme uses Manchester Museum’s collections as a catalyst for providing inspiration, and meaningful support to groups and organisations that have been heavily affected by the coronavirus pandemic, and is open to:
*Third sector organisations offering vital support to people at risk of social isolation, with health conditions, or caring responsibilities.
*Schools and home-schoolers seeking inspirational new resources to support ‘catching-up’ on disrupted education
*Care homes and living independent living facilities
You can find out more about the project by clicking here. There are a number of short films which can be freely viewed to explore some of the project themes and objects from Ancient Egypt on the same link.
This project is funded by The Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund – delivered by the Museums Association.
72 Seasons is a project we ran which now has an online life. It helps connect people to nature, in amongst their ordinary live and has been proven to enhance wellbeing.
If you want to know more, we now have a page with all the 72 Seasons resources and information available in one place.
Huge thanks to all our 2022 clients, many of whom we will still be working with in 2023 and beyond.
The office is closing for Christmas on Thursday 22nd December and will reopen refreshed and renewed on Tuesday 3rd January.
Happy holidays to all.
Kirsty and all at The Evaluator
Accessibility is something that is really important to our organisation. We want to figure things out for people and projects, and part of that is figuring out how to do that for the widest range of people possible!
We are a disability led organisation which is one reason we are passionate about being inclusive. We try hard to follow the social model of disability where we understand that we need to adapt the world around a person’s disabilities and access needs rather than expect them to adapt. We recognise that disability is more than wheelchair access, it’s a wide range of adaptations, many of which are easy and free. We try and include as wide a range of access needs as we can think of in each project and are always willing to adapt to make sure our processes and materials suit the client and participant needs.
We are still learning and imagine we will be for all time, we know we don’t have all the answers but here are some of the ways we try to be more inclusive, all of which are actions we have carried out.
We have three current and recent clients who have taught us a lot about being more accessible.
Attitude is everything have been passionate about including people with disabilities for a long time now. They have a few cultural approaches which we love and which we have tried to follow. Their overarching tag line is ‘nothing for us, without us’ and therefore we have learned to test materials and not make assumptions without asking. It helps us keep flexible. The other way AisE work is to help people make changes from where they are now, not to criticise what they have or haven’t done. Again, that’s something we use now with all our clients, and try to embody ourselves – helping them to make positive progress from wherever they currently are, using data driven decisions of course.
We particularly love their ‘how we think about disability’ approach, which you can read here.
Troi Lee from Deaf Rave was a great client to work with, and we adapted our communication styles, using zoom on mornings when a sign-language interpreter was available. We learned about the Deaf Culture, and attended an event in person to communicate with sign language interpreters therefore adapting our style. Troi described working with Kirsty Rose Parker from The Evaluator as “if you need a evaluator report done. She the one! I have not seen any better report than anyone else has done.”
Troi is a passionate advocate for Deaf music and regularly works with the BBC, most recently taking part in the BBC music introducing festival to put on London x Deaf Rave. You can see more about that festival here.
VocalEyes are a charity who work with people with many different disabilities including visual impairments and people who use screen readers. This has meant making a number of changes to our project evaluation including software changes, allowing for access needs such as emailing questions and using zoom captioning. This has allowed us to learn more about inclusion and practical methods to adapt our styles.
To provide an evaluation report which can be understood by the widest possible range of people, we are currently learning how to make the best accessible report we can and are working on developing spoken video versions of our executive summaries in final reports. Please do ask us if you would want a version of this!
VocalEyes have just produced ten ways to attract deaf, disabled and neurodivergent visitors to heritage sites which is well worth a read. Click here to look at those ten tips.
Back On Our Map is a pioneering project supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and hosted by the University of Cumbria. The project works with communities to reintroduce a suite of locally threatened or extinct species to South Cumbria.
Back on Our Map (BOOM) aims to re-engage communities in South Cumbria with their natural environment, by restoring the landscape and reintroducing and reinforcing locally threatened or extinct native species. National Lottery players support the £2m project, alongside a number of other public, private and charitable sector organisations. Led by the University of Cumbria, BOOM is working closely in partnership with Morecambe Bay Partnership, and lead partners including the Cumbria Wildlife Trust, Natural England and Forestry England. The project:
The Evaluator is delighted to be working with the BOOM project team to both measure and collate the impact on people, to carry out 1:1 interviews and surveys, attend events and design quizzes. We’ll be supporting training the team, having regular conversations and reflections, interviewing partners and reading notes collected throughout the project lifetime.
The information collected will be brought together for a final evaluation report in June 2023. You can find out more about the project here, including events and frequently asked questions.
Climate FORTH is aiming to Further Our Resilience Through Heritage. Run by a partnership of: RSPB Scotland (lead agency), Clackmannanshire Council, Green Action Trust, Falkirk Council, Fife Council, NatureScot, Stirling Council, Sustrans and including advisory partner Historic Environment Scotland. The Evaluator is delighted to be working with the partnership to develop a monitoring and evaluation framework including developing some dedicated tools to measure climate resilience in organisations and individuals.
As Climate FORTH is a project aiming to tackle climate resilience, we started thinking about how this is the ability to bounce back or to weather the storm. This led us onto the idea of creating self-scoring checklists which equate your own or your organisations resilience with the Beaufort Scale. Can you weather a gale? Or just a light breeze? This is what we are working on at present.
The official project description is below;
The Inner Forth Futures partnership is engaged in an ambitious and innovative programme to study, scope and co-design activities with local communities around the unique resilience needs of this landscape. The wealth of existing social, natural and built heritage in this area provides both challenges for adaptation and vital opportunities to facilitate economic and climate readiness.
Across the Inner Forth, from Stirling City to Forth Bridges, heritage and communities, have historically been, entwined in narratives of change and adaptation – whether that be economic, environmental, or societal.
Today, changing climate, flood susceptibility, built development, economic change, recreation and Covid-19 are putting new pressures on people and place.
The Climate FORTH project covers areas of Clackmannanshire, Falkirk, Stirling and Fife that comprise the Inner Forth.
Climate FORTH aims to:
• Promote the value of local heritage, and use it to inspire positive action towards societal and climate change, particularly towards Scotland’s net zero climate targets.
• Increase the resilience of the Inner Forth’s natural and built heritage assets to societal and climate change.
• Increase resilience to change for people and places within the Inner Forth through heritage supporting the economy, healthy lifestyles, sustainable choices, and a just transition.
Climate FORTH is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and is currently in it’s development phase. You can read more about the project by clicking the link here.
The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new client, Fylde Borough Council on their arts and environment project; Green Loop. Based around Lytham St Anne’s, Green Loop as a name was inspired by the idea of creatively re-using the waste products which wash up on the shore.
There are three parts to this project including a new Eco-Market taking place at Fairhaven Lake, running with eco-friendly makers and crafts people and curated by Hopeful & Glorious. It has been really nice to work with Heather from Hopeful & Glorious as we worked together many years ago when both of us were working in Arts Development in Lancashire. Hopeful & Glorious curate many high quality events, and you can see more about them on their website here.
Environmental artist Nerissa Cargill Thompson, is both creating an artist commission and working with a group of volunteers to take part in a 12 week programme to learn how to become an environmental maker with a creative business. That’s a journey of discovery for sure! We will enjoy writing about that as creative business is one of our particular interests.
Nerissa describes her work as:
Exploring change over time, not just eroding or decaying but new layers of growth, giving juxtapositions of structure and colour. Recent mixed media sculptures combine embellished textiles and cement cast in plastic packaging to highlight the legacy of disposables. Naturally inspired textures emphasise the way our waste becomes subsumed into the natural world around us.
Images of recent works can be seen on her website here.
This project is run by Fylde Borough Council whose website is here, and the project is funded by Arts Council England.
The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new client, West Cumbria Rivers Trust to develop and write an evaluation framework for the nature site, and former colliery, Walkmill in Cumbria.
The site is currently used a lot by dog walkers and nature lovers, and has some quite unusual wildlife include rare dragonflies and adders. It is the site of a former colliery and we are excited to figure out how to link the industrial heritage into our evaluation plans. You can see more about West Cumbria Rivers Trust at their website here.
We started this project with a site visit to chat to the main project team, and meet the consultants working on heritage interpretation, Minerva Heritage. We quickly found out we both are very keen on working WITH people, rather than FOR people and are looking forward to getting to know more about interpretation. You can see more about Minerva Heritage at their website here.
It just happened to be a gloriously sunny day, what a wonderful way to start a project!
