Successful Client: The £1.6 million Climate FORTH project gets the go ahead

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Earlier this year, The Evaluator worked with Climate FORTH (Furthering Our Resilience Through Heritage) on their application to the National Lottery Heritage Fund, where we developed an evaluation framework for the whole project. They have just announced they were successful. That’s always a lovely day, sharing in the success of our clients.
The details are below:
A new £1.6million project in the Inner Forth has been granted just over £1million by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to boost the area’s climate resilience through the promotion and enhancement of local heritage.
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Climate FORTH is the latest project from Inner Forth Futures, a landscape-scale partnership which has been operating across the coastal areas of Clackmannanshire, Stirling, Falkirk and Fife since 2012. Since the partnership’s inception, it has delivered both the Inner Forth Landscape Initiative (IFLI) and Wanderings and Windings projects, enhancing and celebrating the local area’s heritage while improving access through a series of waymarked walking and cycling trails.

The new Climate FORTH project will build on these successes by piloting methods of increasing resilience to climate and other changes in the local area’s natural and built heritage, and in its most at-risk communities.

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The project will soon begin work on the delivery of several new initiatives, including green skill training for young people and community groups, enhancement of sustainable travel options around the local area, and capital works at four locations across the project area. The works will improve the climate resilience of greenspaces at Glendevon Drive in Stirling and Rannoch Park in Falkirk, as well as an important community building, Cochrane Hall in Alva, Clackmannanshire and the Gardener’s Cottage ruin at Valleyfield Estate in Fife.
One of the first activities to get underway will be a rebranding of sections of the National Cycle Network which pass through the Inner Forth. Supported by Sustrans, this work will encourage more people to make use of the network and help establish the landscape as a destination for sustainable tourism.
A key aim of Climate FORTH is to pilot new techniques that can be shared with other initiatives and policymakers to inspire further action. The pioneering work of the project will be closely monitored so the knowledge obtained can support Scotland’s aim of achieving net zero emissions by 2045 and help communities move towards a just transition.
Four communities in particular have been identified as being key to the project’s goals, with members playing an active role in decisions involving their local area through the co-design of local resilience plans. They are Hawkhill in Clackmannanshire, Fallin in Stirling, Bainsford & Langlees in Falkirk and Kincardine in Fife.
Climate FORTH Project Manager, Kate Fuller, said, “We’re delighted to have been awarded this Heritage Fund support that will allow us to show how the diverse natural and cultural assets of the Inner Forth can be adapted to tackle the threats of climate change. We’ve seen through our previous work just how special this part of Scotland is. Thanks to National Lottery players, Climate FORTH will enable us to re-invigorate our work with the amazing communities that live here and support them to lead by example as Scotland moves towards achieving net-zero.”
Dave Beaumont, Operations Director for RSPB Scotland said, “We are in a nature and climate emergency and the only way we can meet this challenge is by facing it together. Estuaries such as the Forth are where we are seeing impacts from climate change right now – as sea levels rise, storm intensities increase and rivers flowing into our seas are carrying floodwaters much more frequently. The communities and the incredible wildlife found in and around our estuaries are more fragile than ever and this project will continue our efforts to make them more resilient to the changes ahead.”
Cosmo Blake, Network Engagement Manager for Sustrans Scotland, said, “We are delighted to work with Inner Forth Futures to create a new brand identity and better signage along sections of The National Cycle Network. As well as creating a new brand identity, we are also developing eight new day trips with maps, directional signage and additional bike parking and maintenance stations at local heritage sites and transport hubs. We hope this will encourage more people to walk, wheel and cycle and make sustainable choices when visiting the Inner Forth.”
Heather Macnaughton, Strategic Partnerships Manager at Historic Environment Scotland said, “This funding will build on the exciting work our partnership has already undertaken in the area to help protect this heritage rich estuary from the impact of climate change. Working with the local community, Climate FORTH will shine a light on the area’s natural and built heritage and the important part it can play in improving climate resilience and biodiversity. By working closely with our partners and communities, Historic Environment Scotland looks forward to developing solutions for future resilience and moving together towards a just transition.”
Caroline Clark, Director for Scotland, The National Lottery Heritage Fund said, “This is such an important project for our times – Climate FORTH will enable communities to take the lead in developing their own local responses to the challenges of climate change and Net Zero. What makes this project even more significant is that it will then create templates that can be adapted for use by other communities across Scotland and beyond.”
Inner Forth Futures is a partnership between RSPB Scotland, Clackmannanshire Council, Falkirk Council, Fife Council, Green Action Trust, Historic Environment Scotland, NatureScot, Stirling Council and Sustrans. Climate FORTH is partly funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, with additional funding from the UK Government’s Shared Prosperity Fund, the Crown Estate, IFF members and the Scottish Government through Sustrans Scotland’s Network Engagement Programme. The project will be running from August 2023 – July 2026.
For more information, visit innerforthlandscape.co.uk.

Social Return on Investment; What is it? And do I want it?

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Social Return on Investment (SROI) has been around for quite a while, but it’s still not that well understood. Our director, Kirsty Rose Parker, completed the training back in 2010 and has used it on many occasions.

Carrying out a SROI is a robust framework for writing and describing a wider context of value. It puts a financial proxy on to a  project. It is presented in monetary terms but describes value, not actual money. Because SROI is robust and has a structured methodology, it does have some key principles.

  • Change is change and might not always be positive; there may be some negative implications
  • Stakeholders are key to the whole process; an SROI should start with stakeholders
  • SROI uses financial proxies to value change. Throughout this SROI, existing measures of other similar experiences that could also make the changes our participants told us about have been used as financial proxies.
  • It can’t include everything – not everything that changes in people’s lives is down to the project. It is just as important to know when to stop.
  • An SROI should be truthful. It goes without saying really, but on an exercise like this honesty is the best policy. For an SROI to be believable it does need to be based on evidence and data, and not over-claimed.
  • An SROI should be transparent; explaining the process to give transparency to all the decisions made.
  • Results should be verified, either by stakeholders or experts or both

Some funders do recommend ‘Social Return on Investment’ and all respond positively to it. It is a good methodology and we often follow points 1 and 2 in other evaluations, as we like the structure of reminding us to keep an open mind and see what people tell us.

It works best on projects which make big changes to peoples lives; whether that is changes to mental health or overall health, if people get jobs, or are supported to get housing, for those living with dementia or addiction although the process can be adapted to almost all projects or even an organisation as a whole.

It works best on projects which have a clear start point which can be measured, and ideally would look at value over time. If everyone started a project on the same day, it would need to allow a few months for changes to take place. If a programme allows people to join at any time it can be quicker, as then a team of evaluators would be able to talk to people who had just joined and those who had been taking part for a while in the same month.

It is a process of reflection, and evaluation. It will help teams to think about the changes they enable and to see what their impact is. It can help to build pride in a project or organisation. It can definitely increase investment as it gives investors a clear sense of the change their investment enables.

To simplify; If your project changes lives, then yes you want a SROI. If you can get hold of people taking part then yes you can do a SROI. It does need to be done during a project, it’s not impossible to do one retrospectively but it is much harder, so do try and plan one in earlier rather than later.

Give us a call if you want to know more, we’d be happy to chat through the process. If you want to do it for yourself…

More information, including a guide to working out a SROI can be found here. 

New Project: Urban Forest Accelerator

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The Evaluator is delighted to be starting a new project with National Trust, the Urban Forest Accelerator. We are excited to be working on measuring concepts of urban tree cover, tree equity, environmental justice and developing a new approach to measuring connections. Just as joined up canopies can be more that the sum of their parts, we believe our work relationships can also mirror this and aim to develop a new way to track this over time.

Along the way, we are lucky enough to get to work with inspirational people who want to transform and green our urban areas. We get to have discussions around who should decide what is best for urban trees, to look at tree cover metric developmental work and to use words like arboriculture career pathways and knowledge. Plus, we love trees!

The Urban Forest Accelerator is part of the Future Parks Accelerator and aims to address concepts including; partnership, urban forest capacity, sustainable finance, tree equity, community engagement and learning and scaling.

 

 

Recent Client Feedback

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At The Evaluator, we are committed to learning and improving our work over time. To make sure we achieve this we do evaluate ourselves and ask our clients to give us feedback. Here are some recent results.

 

And let’s end on a detailed client testimonial, from when The Evaluator worked in partnership with Simon Lees from Countryside Training Partnership to create an evaluation framework.

“Kirsty from The Evaluator and Simon from Countryside Training Partnership have challenged and encouraged the Climate FORTH project team and Board to think about monitoring and evaluation in a holistic way, right from this project development stage. The Monitoring and Evaluation Framework created will support our application to NLHF for delivery phase funding and show how we wish to go beyond monitoring outputs to considering the wider impact of National Lottery and other investment through our project. Communication was excellent throughout this contract and an extension was kindly accommodated when our timelines were delayed. The final report is clear, concise and well considered – spot on – we hope that we get an opportunity to enact it! The Evaluator & Countryside Training Partnership have proposed workable and proportional monitoring and evaluation methods to follow in a project delivery phase, identified suitable baseline data and provided friendly advice as we move through our project development phase. I would be pleased to recommend both parties to other organisations and partnerships looking for a personalised professional approach to this type of work.” Kate Fuller, Climate FORTH Project Manager, Inner Forth Futures.

National Research Council Report Published

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Our research report is now published.

Nature and Wellbeing in the Probation Service

Lancashire Wildlife Trust Nature and Wellbeing Service started running sessions at a Probation Service approved premises in October 2020. Running a number of activities such as landscaping, growing food and working as a team, the project ran twice a week, available to the probationers living on site.

As the project was funded through Her Majesty’s Prisons and Probation Service (HMPPS) this evaluation was carried out following approval from the National Research Council for HMPPS and followed all their guidelines including size of summary report.

 

Click here to see three different reports we have published with Lancashire Wildlife Trust. 

 

 

Thanks to all our 2022 clients!

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Images of all our client logos - there are a lot including national trust, wildlife trusts, in-situ, county councils and more

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

Inclusion at The Evaluator: Figuring it out for everyone

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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.

  • When we run 1:1 interviews we can offer to send questions in advance, plan in comfort breaks and run these at times that suit people – including evenings and weekends
  • We can use large font sizes on emails or text clients or schedule regular zoom calls
  • We use easy to read fonts on our surveys and our infographics and use contrasting colours in graphs as much as possible
  • We are happy to communicate however people prefer – whether that is by email, by text, by zoom, by phone call – or even mixed methods, for example mixing text and video call by using zoom captioning
  • We can run sessions when people have supporters or interpreters available and make our timetable flexible
  • We provide large print versions of our final reports and executive summaries on request
  • We have worked hard to ensure all our visuals are compatible with screen readers, use alt-text as much as possible and break reports into sections using headings and subheadings for clarity
  • We can provide surveys in alternative ways – for example using Google Forms or as paper copies
  • We worked with a client to use sign language videos on our surveys to make sure people understand the questions asked and adapted our questions to suit British Sign Language (BSL) rather than expecting BSL to adapt to our questions
  • We offer adaptations to our interview processes when hiring and offer flexible working conditions and hours

We have three current and recent clients who have taught us a lot about being more accessible.

  1. Attitude is everything

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. 

  1. Deaf Rave

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.

  1. VocalEyes

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.

 

New Evaluation: Green Loop

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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.

Site Visit: Wilder Walkmill

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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!

Image of site, Walkmill in Cumbria.