A final blog on behalf of the Fulfilling Lives evaluation team from Rachel Moreton, Associate Director at CFE Research.

As I said at the final Fulfilling Lives conference earlier this year, when we first started working on the programme evaluation back in 2013, it was difficult to imagine what it would feel like to reach the end of this huge undertaking.

Well, we’ve finally reached that point. And what an experience it has been.

We always knew the context for the programme would change and influence outcomes. At the very start of the programme our then Managing Director illustrated in an early blog how things can change over nine years – the previous eight years (2005-2013) had seen the credit crunch and double-dip recession, the Arab […]

Miranda joined the Fulfilling Lives evaluation team in January 2022 to support the final months of the learning programme, including organisation of the final conference.

My mission, should I choose to accept it: sum up an eight-year programme of work spanning 12 regions across the country, that has supported nearly 4,000 people facing multiple disadvantage, in a six-hour event to share learning, inspire and challenge attendees to think differently about current support systems, and celebrate the programme’s achievements.

Sure, I said.  I love a conference and I’ve worked with a huge number of fantastic people across my time working in the Fulfilling Lives programme.  What a great chance to get everyone together!

But also… what a difficult task! It quickly became clear that we were never going […]

Emma Adams is a NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) North East and North Cumbria (NENC) Mental Health Fellow and previous NIHR School for Public Health Research (SPHR) Pre-Doctoral Fellow. She has been working with Experts by Experience from Fulfilling Lives Newcastle Gateshead & #HealthNow Newcastle on a NIHR SPHR funded study Exploring and understanding access to community-based mental health and addiction services in Newcastle and Gateshead.

What is co-production? This is a question I often find myself grappling with as a public health researcher working within homelessness and mental health. The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) recognises that the definition is not always clear and there is “no one size fits all approach”. Their guidance on co-producing research suggests that we […]

The rapid growth in exempt accommodation is highlighted as a particular concern in our recent report “More than a Roof”. In this blog Alana Raybould outlines the work of one Fulfilling Lives partnership to address the issue. Alana is the Network and Quality Manager at BVSC, the lead organisation for Birmingham Changing Futures Together (BCFT). As part of her role she manages the No Wrong Door Network and Quality Standards.

As the lead organisation for BCFT, BVSC work to tackle social challenges that cannot be addressed by a single organisation. Where we encounter an issue that relates to one of the areas of multiple disadvantage, we engage in an in-depth piece of work to explore and improve the situation for service users. One […]

Mark Crowe, Research and Evaluation Coordinator at WY-FI has worked for the Fulfilling Lives programme for the last 8 years. In this blog, he reflects on the importance of evaluation within the programme.

I have been involved with Fulfilling Lives since the beginning, working with three different partnerships and lead organisations in West Yorkshire. There was so much that attracted me to the role – the focus on supporting the most disadvantaged and excluded people; a commitment from the funder to person-centred approaches and co-production; and an explicit link between practice and policy development.

I have spent a lot of my working life (which is roughly as long as the National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) has been giving grants to good causes) writing reports that must be […]

In our final blog of 2020, the Fulfilling Lives national evaluation team offer our collective highlights and reflections on what has been a most extraordinary year.

• The Fulfilling Lives programme provides much-needed support for people facing multiple disadvantage. This year the programme passed the 4,000 mark for numbers of direct beneficiaries.
• There is great energy across the local partnerships to drive work to change the system of support for people facing multiple disadvantage, both at local and national level. Read about the partnerships’ systems change priorities here.
• One of the priorities shared across partnerships is improving access to services, in particular mental health support. At the start of the year we published a report exploring the barriers to accessing mental health support […]