Evaluating Creative Civic Change 

Creative Civic Change is focused around using resident-led creative activity to respond to communities’ own needs and desires.  

Our evaluation approach has been to support CCC areas in identifying the changes that were most important to them, and developing creative, rigorous and engaging ways to measure these changes. 

We started by hosting a series of workshops with CCC areas, using creative activities to identify the changes they hoped to make, and to build an evaluation plan to measure these changes.  From these plans we were able to map a series of themes and outcomes that were common across the projects. 

The broad themes that CCC areas are working around are placemaking, boosting social connectivity and wellbeing, supporting local talent, skills & economy, building confidence & agency, and unlocking creativity.

We are now supporting CCC areas to deliver their evaluation plans through:

1. Co-designing a creative methods toolkit for CCC areas. This includes a question bank, simple creative methods and ways of analysing data. 
2. Evaluation support through a mix of one to ones and workshops.
3. Regular peer learning events, where CCC areas can reflect on and share what’s working, what isn’t, and what they are learning. 

• Co-creation: every aspect of our work, from our evaluation framework to the creative methods toolkit, to our reports, is created with CCC areas.  We are inspired and stretched by the rigour of CCC areas’ co-creation practices.
• Creativity: we are passionate about the possibilities of creative evaluation methods, and committed to developing methods with CCC areas that are simple, rigorous and engaging.
• Respect and equity: we value the wide variety of perspectives and expertise brought by the CCC working groups.
• Open-minded: we are open to reflection, challenge and change.
• Empowering and enabling: we hope to create a positive legacy of reflection, research, and evaluation.
• Simplicity: this was an important addition from the CCC areas at our first evaluation workshop – committing to simple, clear processes and reports.

We will share all our learning from the programme in a series of reports, the first, ‘Preparing the Ground: Learning from the first year of Creative Civic Change’ can be found here.

A second important strand of learning the role that artists and art organisations play in community life, and how CCC has impacted on the way that artists and arts organisations think about this relationship. 

The CCC evaluation team will evaluate this directly through artists/arts organisations surveys, in-depth interviews and from CCC areas’ own evaluations. 

We will also hold regular sessions with funders to reflect on what they are learning from the programme and how these learnings might influence the sector.

Drawing from communities’ own evaluations (Strand 1), surveys and interviews with artists and arts organisations (Strand 2), and regular reflections sessions with the CCC funding partners (Strand 3), we will produce a series of learning reports over the 3 years of the CCC programme.

Our learning reports will highlight evidence and learning reflections for:

• communities and community groups wanting to use creativity to address community needs, desires and issues;
• the arts sector, particularly around co-creation and working in resident-led ways;
• funders in both the arts and community sectors, particularly around the value of creative and resident-led approaches. 

We also hope to share our creative methods toolkit in the coming months – this is currently being tweaked and tested by CCC areas.

In the collaborative spirit of Creative Civic Change, we have engaged three independent researchers to evaluate the programme. Each of our team brings different strengths and experience to the mix.

Sarah Boiling is our lead evaluator with over 20 years’ experience of bringing culture closer to people through evaluation, research, facilitation and training. Sarah has worked with a variety of cultural organisations including Tate, the Roundhouse, Havering Changing and Arts Council Wales.

Amanda Smethurst leads on the peer learning aspects of the evaluation and support programme. Amanda is an experienced facilitator and coach, and is currently the National Peer Learning Manager for Creative People and Places.  

Anousheh Haghdadi (Beatfreeks) brings experience in co-created and creative evaluation and research. Beatfreeks has created research and evaluation installations and experiences for Lush, Arts Council England and NESTA.