Better Outcomes New Delivery
Evaluation development
Salford are championing a new way of supporting families in crisis, on the brink of the care system. By incorporating a family resilience lens to their work, they hope to reduce the incidence of family breakdown, keeping families together whenever possible.
The need
Salford Council are bringing together four seemingly disparate programmes to form BOND – Better Outcomes for New Delivery. These programmes all work with families at risk of breakdown, triggered by different stressors depending on their context and experience. We were asked to create an evaluation framework for BOND to determine the extent to which this combined approach is able to build family resilience and keep families together.
Our response
We worked with programme leads to define theories of change for each individual programme which then enabled us to identify common outcomes across the programmes. We then worked to explore what was driving these outcomes and use system dynamics and causal loops to how these drivers undermined the current work being done in each programme. We looked at current programme activities, to explore the extent to which family resilience was being supported by current work and then looked to the research and the causal loop diagrams created by programme managers to explore how activities might be bolstered. We were able to create an overarching theory of change for BOND, with shared activities and outcomes across all BOND programmes with a shared ultimate outcome of increasing family resilience to prevent family breakdown. This will enable a clear line of sight from activity to outcome, and the monitoring and evaluation of this.
We have been commissioned and funded to do this work by Salford Council.
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