So What? Learning From Our 2022-25 Evaluation
Findings from our 2022-25 Evaluation, shared by Robyn Knox - Director of the VCS Emergencies Partnership.
So what? The team would say I ask them this the most. A broken record maybe but it’s an important question for me. I want us - as a team and as a Partnership - to think about not just what we’re doing but what we’re learning and how we ensure we understand the change and impact we’re having.
For the last few years, we’ve been working with independent evaluators to help us unpack the ‘so what’ more formally, as a team and a Partnership. The good people at realife Learning were commissioned as part of our grant from Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to evaluate our work between 2022-25 and I’m very pleased to share the final report with you all.
We are proud that the evaluation recognises our work as “connective tissue helping bring different parts of the resilience sector together”, they call this “relational infrastructure” which sounds right to us. We want the partnership to be a space where everyone from grassroots organisations to statutory bodies feel welcome and connected to building resilience. A place to bring everyone to the table.
The evaluation also found that we had become a “trusted bridge between the voluntary and community sector (VCS) and local authorities and government”. The representative role to UK Government is one that often falls to me as Director and it’s one I take seriously, so I’m pleased to have partners’ trust on this. However, the evaluation also found there is more to do to close the feedback loop by reporting back what has happened because of voluntary sector’s input. I’ll be focusing on how I and the team can support this more while recognising that we do not have control of every part of this loop.
The evaluation showed we’re on the right track with how we’re supporting the development of skills and capabilities in resilience. They point to our new ‘Train-the-Trainer' approach and scenario exercising to be more effective at helping building skills and confidence. We had a hunch we might be onto something by how long the waiting lists are for these sessions so we’ll look for how we can develop more practical learning spaces to support partners share and develop even more.
We have been making efforts to clarify and embed our approach to Equalities. The evaluation found we have raised awareness about “how emergencies affect marginalised communities and created platforms for equality-led organisations to influence resilience planning” which we’re really pleased to hear. Crucially, the report also notes that funding is a huge constraint for grassroots and equality-led organisations which affects how they can participate in the partnership. The evaluation encourages us to do more to share leadership to seek to address this, so we’re looking at how we reshape our Partnership Board and consider where we represent and where we need create space for others to lead to ensure we’re removing barriers where we can.
We’ve found the evaluation has held up a mirror and we have recognised ourselves; fortunately, it was not a distorting funhouse mirror. We can see clearly the parts we felt were working and the parts we find challenging. We hope that partners will also see us - and their work within the Partnership - fairly represented in this report as well.
We also hope that the findings from our report might be useful for you in your work. That’s what the Partnership is all about, taking the learning from one part of the resilience sector or one corner of the country and applying the parts that are most helpful to another. We hope you’ll say “I’ll have that” with any useful lessons and ask yourselves “so what” as we continue to do.
Robyn Knox MBE
Director
VCS Emergencies Partnership