Commissioning Opportunities Are Shown Here
Evaluation – Community Renewal Lifting Neighbourhoods Together
2020-2024 £250,000
Published March 2020
Community Renewal Trust are seeking a suitably qualified partner or consortium to be the evaluator for the Community Renewal Lifting Neighbourhoods Together programme. The budget for this work is £250,000 for the period up to 2024.
To download the specification and application questions you need to complete this form:
Once it says above that you have “signed up” you will get an email with a link to all the documents.
Responses to this Invitation to Tender should be sent by email by 10am on 4 May 2020 to karen.harkins@communityrenewal.org.uk . This is an extension to the original deadline of 14 April.
Questions may be asked by email sent to karen.harkins@communityrenewal.org.uk but must be received before 10am 8 April 2020. Answers to questions will be sent out in batches to all those who have registered an interest in the Invitation to Tender.
Programme Overview and Evaluation Introduction
Community Renewal: Lifting Neighbourhoods Together (CR:LNT) is a 5-year £3.5m programme by Community Renewal Trust and partners with £2.1m funding from the National Lottery Community Fund. It seeks to demonstrate that system and behavioural change among frontline public service staff can lift a neighbourhood out of poverty simply by integrating services at a neighbourhood level while developing expertise in case management and community engagement. We believe that deep down people in our communities know what they need and we will be building their own capacity to support themselves throughout this work.
Community Renewal Trust has spent twenty years working in deprived neighbourhoods and have observed through this experience that:
- There is already significant investment through frontline workers in delivering public services (especially urgent/responsive services) to try to meet the needs of people in deprived areas plus billions more spent on physical regeneration.
- People in deprived communities already know what is required to improve their lives – what they need is help with how to make it happen and to be at the heart of how we respond locally.
- Proactively engaging, welcoming, really listening and then sticking with people for as long as it takes are key to delivering all local interventions.
- Sustainable transformation in communities is possible but needs a long term commitment.
- Community Renewal’s teams already have processes, training and tools to improve the ability of public services to be effective in improving lives in a whole neighbourhood. These have been well tested individually and have measurably reduced poverty in neighbourhoods for a short-period during an intervention.
We now believe that we can get a neighbourhood to a tipping point where it is no longer stuck in a cycle of poverty. This may happen if a range of frontline workers from the third sector and public sector came together using the approaches we have developed to become:
- better able to engage people in the community proactively;
- better able to offer person-centred asset-based case management;
- more flexible to meet community and community member needs; and
- enable members of the community to lead in their own transformation.
The many frontline workers and service managers we have spoken to are very excited – they often know exactly how they could make a greater impact if they had more of these freedoms and abilities. This will enable local frontline workers to help local people help themselves.
The first main step to delivering this programme is to establish a Neighbourhood Transformation Team (NTT). This team will be hosted by a local partner already embedded in the neighbourhood In the Edinburgh neighbourhood this is Community Renewal Trust and in the Newcastle neighbourhood it is Building Futures East. The members of the NTT are: frontline staff from public agencies who have some/all of their time donated to work within the team; frontline staff already working for the local hosting partner who have some/all of their time donated to work within the team; and a manager. The frontline workers are coming from specialities in youth work, employability, welfare advice, housing, social work, community food, and community development.
The team will then undertake ongoing training, reflection and development work so they can deliver community engagement and case management as well as continuing to deliver their existing specialism but better integrated with the team and local neighbourhood.
The evaluation will be a single contract with a single lead evaluation partner.
However, we recognise that there are three different aspects to the evaluation which may require different staff or organisations to be involved. We would encourage approaches which included partnership working or consortia (as long as there is a single lead partner).
The below tables sets out the three evaluation strands:
| Evaluation Strand | Key Questions |
| Impact/cost benefit evaluation | – To what extend have we lifted a neighbourhood out of poverty?
– In what ways has the neighbourhood and people’s lives improved? – What is the ratio of cost to benefit when we look at financial benefit to people and to local/national governments? |
| Learning/ qualitative evaluation | – To what extent has can we evidence that the system of public service in the neighbourhood changed for the better?
– To what extent can we evidence that staff behaviours have changed for the better? – How can other neighbourhoods replicate this model by learning from the developmental processes, system change, behavioural change and processes/approach? |
| Formative evaluation | – What possible early improvements can we learn from and implement after the first years of delivery? |
