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 […]
  

Organisations are simply collections of people who are working, to a lesser or greater extent, toward a common set of goals.  While organisational policies often clearly define the actions to take in common situations, sometimes the context is exceptional requiring staff and managers to apply their judgement.  The aim is to achieve something consistent with the spirit of the policies leading to defensible decision that achieves the outcomes understood to be consistent with the aims of the organisation.

We are, however, also creatures of habit.

Using precedent is a way we navigate though complexity to manage the personal and professional risks associated with using judgement.  These socially circumscribed understandings then often become unwritten additions to the system for exceptions handling. Part of the culture. A part of […]

Gary Morris, programme manager of Waves of Hope reflects on what they have learned about delivery and transition as the programme comes to an end this December. 

It was a cold winter morning when the email from National Lottery Community Fund came through agreeing a six month continuation period for the Liverpool Fulfilling lives programme “Waves of Hope”. The agreement meant two things, firstly more time to plan for the transition of over 100 service users out of the programme and secondly to give more time to the Core Strategy Group to prepare to deliver the learning and legacy outcomes to the wider multiple disadvantage sector. During that time a lot has been achieved: the almost 100 per cent delivery of the transition plan which enables […]

Dr Ray Middleton is the Workforce Development Lead for the National Lottery Community Fund’s Fulfilling Lives programme in Newcastle and Gateshead (FLNG). With a special interest in trauma-informed care, Ray is piloting a programme to develop Psychologically Informed Environments (PIE) in frontline services combining an innovative ‘Open Dialogue’ approach to mental health with PIE using the ‘Ladder4Life’ framework he developed.

A Psychologically Informed Environment (PIE) is a space which considers ‘the psychological make up – the thinking, emotions, personalities and past experience – of its participants in the way that it operates’ (Johnson et al., 2012).

As described in my last blog at FLNG we have long been enthusiastic promoters of PIE and have used our experience to develop and deliver a PIE training programme that supports other local […]