Meet the team Work with us
Systems Thinking Training Reaching Families Remotely Pathways to Connection
 
 

LAMBETH EARLY ACTION PARTNERSHIP PROJECT

As part of our commitment to sustainable and participatory approaches to evidence, we wanted to promote the learning from the work co-designed by our three Community Researchers living and working in Lambeth, working with us to evaluate the Lambeth Early Action Partnership (LEAP) systems change project.

Using this method helps unpick complex, place-based systemic problems and can support tailoring services to better serve communities. We are sharing these insights to support others in the research and evaluation community who are thinking about or already undertaking community-led research, particularly in the early years sector.

LEAP is one of five ‘A Better Start’ sites funded by the Big Lottery Community Fund (BLCF), supported by the National Children’s Bureau. It delivers services across Lambeth to meet the needs of families during pregnancy and the early years of childhood. You can read more about their story here.

As the funding comes to a close, it’s important to understand the impact and value of their contribution to Lambeth and the wider early years community over the past 10 years.

In 2021, Dartington was commissioned to work with LEAP and the services in Lambeth to understand what was needed to drive their improvement journey and ability to flex and adapt to the rapidly changing context in Lambeth. Specifically, we were tasked with looking at what works well, what improvement looks like and what effect LEAP may have had on the lives of families and children in the Early Years.

Community Researchers supported the evaluation by using a storytelling approach to bridge the realities of the community and their cultural practices with the complexities of services and the context in which they are working.

 

Pathways to Connection is the collective name for the series of products created by the Community Researchers as a way to tell this story. This page speaks to three specific learnings that demonstrate how Community Research in evaluation can:

  • Address power, equity and trust in place-based research.

  • Expand evaluation questions.

  • Build a greater understanding of complex systems.

By working in this way, we hope others can:

  • Create a more holistic, co-produced, rigorous approach to their own evaluation practices.

  • Adopt a policy that is informed by wider evidence.

  • Look beyond immediate strategies and work towards systems-wide change that responds to what works, for who, in what context and why.

  • Reduce inequalities in childhood outcomes in the way they programme early years and family support.

MEET THE COMMUNITY RESEARCHERS

Anita has been a Brixton resident for 11 years. Since becoming a mother, LEAP has become a valuable part of her network. Anita has a research background and now works as an Occupational Therapist within the field of mental health. 

Natoya is a mother of five children, who has been living in Lambeth for 20 years. Natoya is a graduate of the University of East London, where she studied Social and Community Work,

Ela is a mum of one, living in Lambeth. Her professional background is in Early Years Education and she is very passionate about Social Justice as well as building and supporting local and global communities.

Why Community Research?

We chose this approach because it speaks to the topic of ‘power-sharing’. In our talk at the CYPNow Conference of 2022, we spoke about how evaluation, using community research as a primary form of evidence, can:

  • Address issues around inclusion and equity

  • Reach and represent more members of the community

  • Develop more collective sustainable ownership and trust for the outcomes.

You can read more about this in our blog, written to reflect our conference topic.

How can community research help us grasp complexity?

The storytelling approach used by the Community Researchers supported the decentralisation of evaluators and services, and reemphasised the complexity of the ecosystem in which LEAP delivers in. Specifically, it helped signal the importance of supports for families both within and outside of LEAP.

They asked community members: “What does connection mean to you?”

This openness allowed for authentic interpretation from the community and helped LEAP redefine the context of their support offering in Lambeth as one form of connection and support.

To present the findings, the Community Researchers chose to step away from the office and into the most talked-about part of the research: Brockwell Park. Each point of the map (as seen in the illustration) had significance to the research findings.

You can read the findings (right), or listen to the podcast all about the learning from doing this research project in practice.

COMBINING SYSTEM THINKING TOOLS WITH COMMUNITY RESEARCH

In this blog shared by Systemic Change Lead, Megan Keenan, we are made aware of the way we can combine a participatory approach with system thinking tools. We use these tools at Dartington Service Design Lab to explore different contexts and the dynamic relationships that exist within them, giving us a deeper understanding of the social, cultural and economic forces that impact children and families – and more importantly, how we can respond to them.

As part of the formative evaluation work, the Community research team used a particular tool called ‘eco-mapping’ to explore how (and if) systems of social support (like LEAP) influenced families within the nuance of their local social, economic, and cultural contexts. We wanted to share the learning to help others looking to transform their services and community offers, to better help families and children.

You can hear more about the experience of doing this, from the researchers’ perspective, in Episode 2 of the podcast.