Community Resilience Fund Learning and Evaluation Partner

1. Overview

GambleAware understands that many of the communities that are most disproportionately affected by gambling harms are also amongst those most affected by the current cost of living crisis. The Community Resilience Fund provides funding that specifically prioritises disadvantaged communities, with a focus on those most affected by the cost-of-living crisis, related to gambling harm.  In this fund we are also looking to build new relationships with organisations that work with disadvantaged and marginalised communities.

The CRF programme will run over 12 months, providing funding to 22 projects across GB, as grants. Grants range in their size, with the largest being around £100,000 and the smallest just under £5,000. Most of the grantees are locally rooted organisations, but also include some local branches of broader UK-wide organisations. They vary in their governance arrangements, experience of working in the field of gambling and in their capability and capacity for monitoring and evaluation. Funded projects also vary widely in the activity that they will provide and broadly cover themes of:

• Awareness raising;
• Counselling / therapy;
• Group support; and,
• Training of staff and volunteers on gambling harms.

2. The Evaluation

The evaluation has been designed to deliver against the following objectives:

1. Identify and learn from projects and local partnerships with potential for effectiveness with a focus on what works for whom and in what circumstance.

2. Provide learning to the programme team about how to work with new and emerging organisations and contribute to the sharing of learning between grantees.

3. Build capability of organisations to undertake Monitoring and Evaluation of their work to reduce gambling harms.

The evaluation design will include both process evaluation and capability building and learning facilitation. The wish to deliver an equitable evaluation lies at the core of the design of this project. This means that participant ownership is essential, and that those affected feel they are involved in defining what “success” looks like and the set-up of the evaluation.

3. Methods

The methods have been designed to account for the importance of evaluating and learning from projects to build an evidence base of ‘what works for whom’ to support and inform future commissioning and national policy. To achieve this, the process evaluation will incorporate elements of realist evaluation to explore how changes are brought about by a project (i.e. mechanisms of change). This approach considers the targeted actors (i.e. stakeholders and end beneficiaries), and the conditions under which changes are (or are not) observed.  The process evaluation will be mixed-method, triangulating findings across a range of sources.

To meet the study objectives, a learning strand will build Monitoring & Evaluation capability among the 22 funded projects and facilitate sharing of learning. This strand will provide tailored support to organisations – appropriate to the level and type of existing capacity and capabilities – to enable successful and sustainable self-monitoring and evaluation for this project and beyond.