Starting from Values - Evaluating Intangible Legacies

This project is concerned with the legacy of AHRC funded Connected Communities projects. In this project, we will work together in eight diverse and overlapping AHRC Connected Communities - academic networks, civil society organizations, online communities, and groups rooted in physical neighbourhoods - to co-develop creative ways of identifying, evaluating and enhancing intangible, values-related aspects of project legacies. The question of legacy is closely connected to the values of different stakeholders, yet these values are rarely discussed openly, and many are not considered measurable in tangible ways. As a result, traditional evaluations tend to reflect the values of donors or governments, and what can be easily measured, rather than considering what project partners may be striving to achieve.

This project is innovative in bringing out unheard voices and legacies and giving them authority, by bringing together three emerging strands of interdisciplinary research. One is the co-development of creative and arts-based research methodologies which can enable different knowledges and 'ways of knowing' to be understood (e.g. visual, theatrical). Another is the use of a values lens for the local elicitation of appropriate indicators, frameworks or entire evaluation systems that allow locally important, 'intangible' outcomes to be clarified and effectively communicated. The third is an exploration of new forms of authority that are not derived from static laws or structures, but from sources of creativity. A careful, critical and reflective synthesis of these three strands will enable us to co-map less tangible legacies and pathways of influence for CC projects, making them 'quasi-objective' rather than subjective, and granting them legitimacy and authority in wider political and policy arenas. In so doing, we will be developing an approach that may provide the same, much needed, service in several other arenas such as sustainability, civil society and values based management.

The research will use a structure of five collaborative events, building an iterative and reflective cycle into the research process. We are a consortium of academic and community partners with extensive combined experience in co-design, critical approaches to participatory research, and innovative research methodologies. We will develop locally relevant and rigorous evaluation approaches to explore, crystallise and articulate self-defined 'intangible legacies' through workshops for some, and a retreat for others. We will draw on different arts and humanities scholarship, exploring, for instance, the importance of material expressions of authority, and the transformative and informative role of co-created visual arts. In such ways, we will build up shared understandings of what is important to us, and in the process making it more locally measurable. This will enhance our ability to communicate our deeply-held priorities, focus future work effectively, build on the legacy of recent projects, and influence wider arenas of policy and practice. Our approach will contribute to enhancing CC legacies rather than merely documenting them, in that increased awareness of the identified valued legacies will cause them to be supported further. It will also support the creation of new networks and enable and empower participants in these projects to themselves become co-designers of values-based evaluation systems.

Our community co-investigators will lead on developing and embedding similar evaluative approaches in at least six other Connected Communities projects, both in order to test the generalizability of the new approaches, and to facilitate project partners to become (vernacular) designers of values-focused evaluation systems. We will share our findings with the wider Connected Communities programme and achieve wide dissemination through information packs, multimedia production and a public showcase event.

While the initial impetus for the co-development of this bid came from the AHRC-CC Workshop held in Edinburgh in July 2013, the proposed research strongly responds to the felt needs of participating community organizations. Community co-investigators, separately and prior to this bid, had already been reflecting on ways of evaluating some of the less tangible legacies associated with completed and ongoing CC projects. In particular, aspects such as the nature of relationships between academic and community partners were felt to be beyond the realm of conventional evaluation - even if they were experienced as one of the most distinctive and rewarding aspects of CC work.

In this respect, the proposed research will generate a substantial and lasting impact at individual, interpersonal and collective levels within the specific organizations (and networks) whose senior managers are participating as Co-Investigators. At the individual level, it will move beyond a 'training' or 'capacity building' approach to one that seeks actively to empower the participating CCIs as vernacular designers of values-based, context-appropriate monitoring and evaluation systems for completed and ongoing CC projects. (This will result not only in enhanced participation in co-design, but also in meta-design, i.e. sustainable infrastructuring of appropriate values-based monitoring and evaluation systems within the participating organizations.) At the interpersonal level, we anticipate improved group dynamics and a strengthening of professional relationships both within and between organizations. We further expect that CCIs, acting in the capacity of chief executives / directors of the respective organizations, will actively use the learning from the project to make changes in organizational policy, strategic decision-making and practice. These collective-level changes, arising from an increased understanding of which intangible outcomes are important to CCIs and to other key stakeholders, will contribute to increasing the effectiveness of the respective organizations in relation to localized values-based criteria.

Beyond this initial circle of direct participants (primary arena of influence), the research - like the CC projects it seeks to evaluate - will generate a 'ripple effect' across multiple arenas. One such arena is represented by wider communities of interest, locality and practice that have already been involved with the CC programme, and thus have much to gain from understanding the intangible legacies of the programme (especially in relation to values) and their implications for policy and practice. In the case of Scaling Up Co-Design, for example, these include community centres and activist groups in London where The Glass House has tested and used the `Design by Consensus' methodology; a group of formerly marginalised young people who have been trained and empowered as community journalists and film-makers by Silent Cities in Sheffield; and online communities of people with disabilities, and of women working in information and communication technologies (Blackwood Foundation and Fossbox respectively).

The flexible and highly collaborative structure of this research is intended to create opportunities for networking and direct collaborations between wider-arena beneficiaries and the core project steering group. Most of these connections will be emergent rather than predesigned; but as a specific example, we have committed resources to sub-contract the Silent Cities community journalists to produce a short documentary film highlighting some of the intangible legacies identified during the project. The film will form part of the final 'showcase' event in February 2015; yet the processes of making it may be as important as the output itself, contributing to self-esteem, income-generation, and skill development through practice.