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QM Centre for Creative Collaboration
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Culture, Connectedness, Evaluation

Generating sustainable approaches to the evaluation of culture in its place.

Culture, Connectedness, Evaluation is a long-term research initiative delivered in partnership with People’s Palace Projects and Arts Council England. It seeks to generate robust evidence for the value of culture in east London and build skills, capacity and resources for evaluation in the sector. Drawing on an evaluation approach developed by PPP in collaboration with economists in Brazil, this project brings knowledge and paradigms from the Global South and applies them to evaluation practices and systems in east London. Stages in the project so far include:

  1. A pilot training scheme in 2021, delivered to a network of east London organisations – Artsadmin, Bow Arts, Donmar Warehouse, English National Ballet, Mile End Community Project, Spitalfields Music, and Whitechapel Gallery. 
  2. A consultation workshop in 2023 with major funders and policy makers in the cultural arena including members of the DCMS culture team, Arts Council England, GLA, Tower Hamlets Council, Clore Leadership, Esmee Fairbairn, examining the systematic challenges of understanding and sharing the data generated through evaluations by cultural organisations. This aims to sustain this focus on evaluation through generating longitudinal evaluation projects with networks of east London cultural partners.
  3. Two workshops in Spring 2024 to develop ideas for data sharing solutions that help arts and culture organisations in Tower Hamlets to build a more meaningful understanding of their impact, using place based approaches to evaluation. Ideas generated across these workshops will inform the next phase of the project, which focuses on the role a university can play to support shared solutions to the evaluation challenges faced by the sector. 

Visual minutes by Woven Ink

group of people at a workshop on evaluation techniques

Participants from east London organisations at the evaluation training workshop in 2021

The training introduced us to the macro concepts of evaluation through focussing us on specific examples from our organisations – this allowed us to engage in very directive thinking about outcomes, giving us tangible tools to carry out an evaluation project in the next phase of training. The sessions were also really clarifying in the way that they helped us see how other teams within our own organisations might need to approach/ think about the evaluation process very differently.
— Benjamin Lalague - English National Ballet
The programme has been a huge eye opener for me. … Our work in the community is constant, although we evaluate projects, time is one of our biggest barriers that stops us from carrying in depth evaluations. However, this programme has really made me think of the importance of evaluation and how it can be used in order to create further opportunities for our organisation but to also to better understand and grow as a community.
— Nurull Islam - Mile End Community Project 
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