NW Civic Activism - Project Evaluation Opportunity

The DiverseCity Community Partnership, through our lead partner Holywell Trust, wish to appoint an independent evaluator to assess the effectiveness and impact of the NW Civic Activism project. This project is part of Building Change Trsut's Civic Activism Programme. The NW Civic Activism project uses four engagement tools to engage with local citizens:

1 Citizen Reporting – Citizen reporting involves individuals in reporting on a specific project issue. It is strongly focused on social media and other online tools as mechanisms for transmitting and collating photos, videos and comments.  Holywell Trust have featured Citizen Reports through our Fingerpost website. 

2 Study Groups – Study groups provide a collaborative and democratic approach to addressing important public issues.  Holywell Trust have utilized this tool to empower local people to share their experience and expertise by coming together to deal with a specific project theme.

3 Pop-up Democracy/Discussion – Pop-up democracy is a term for institutional forms that use temporary, site-specific practices to provide opportunities for increased civic participation.

4 Citizen Jury - Citizen Juries are participatory processes, which are used to consider all of the evidence gathered through utilising the above three   engagement tools.   The jury hear from expert ‘witnesses’ before agreeing a solution or recommendation to be passed on to the relevant decision makers.

The above tools were used through the project to explore the following four themes:

1. Innovation & Investment
2. Youth & Young People
3. Debt & Poverty
4. City Centre

Project Outcomes:

The following summarises the project outcomes for the NW Civic Activism Project:

Outcome 1: Project structure established, systems developed and implemented

Outcome 2: Project delivery - Examination of four identified issues (Innovation & Investment, Young People, Debt & Poverty and City Centre) utilising the above tools

Outcome 3: Assessment of the impact of the project and influencing of decisions and recommendations with key influencers.

Evaluation Objectives:

The following outlines the objectives of this particular evaluation:

1. To assess the effectiveness of the project and progress in achieving agreed indicators/outputs
2. To capture feedback from project participants
3. To document the learning/outcomes of the project
4. To produce a final evaluation report.

A terms of reference for this contract is available to download.