• Summary
• About Us
• The project
• Draft hypothesis & learning questions
• Project plan overview
• Timeline
• Apply 

The Social Change Agency is excited to open this bid for the evaluation of our programme Community Leadership in Motion. We are seeking to hire a programme evaluator consultant to evaluate our programme at the end of its second year and help us build a framework for future years. The Community Leadership in Motion is The Social Change Agency and BUDs flagship programme. We are working with Impact on Urban Health to support community leaders and groups across Lambeth and Southwark with funding, community organising support and a leadership development course to build capacity and sustainability. We give out funding through our fiscal hosting service so we are able to provide funding to unincorporated groups. We base all the support we offer on the assumption that communities know what they need and regularly adapt the work we do to meet the changing needs of the groups we work with. Our work is underpinned by a collaborative leadership framework.

The Social Change Agency

The Social Change Agency is the UK’s leading social impact consultancy, specialising in creating and supporting powerful social movements for impact. We work systemically, using insight and innovative approaches to cut through the complexity of achieving social change at scale in a messy, interconnected world. Everything we do, from programme delivery and design, to unconferences, movement building strategies, and communities of practice, is designed to connect people and enable them to build the skills, knowledge and networks to make change happen.

We also support new grassroots movements to grow, to scale up and ultimately, to change the world. We do this through our ‘Nest’ service which provides essential start-up and sustainability support to grassroots movements and networks to grow their impact. Networks and movements we’ve ‘nested’ include; the UK Student Climate Network, Uplift, and the Lambeth Portuguese Wellbeing Partnership.

BUD

BUD (Businesses Under Development) are a premier social enterprise dedicated to providing support to those leading positive change. We offer a variety of unconventional, transformational leadership programmes. We facilitate, coach and consult individuals, change makers, businesses, social enterprises, and community groups. We have been working to plug this gap between a desire to lead change and having the tools and support to do so since 2014. BUD’s mission is to help others achieve the most by obtaining skills from those around them. By incorporating our values into our methods we guide our clients along the pathway to success. BUD builds and trains leaders to be empowered and enabled to fearlessly develop strategy, engage their audiences and leave a legacy.

—

Our programmes are designed to continue to build capacity by training other trainers and leaders to equip others in their enterprises and communities.

We are excited to find a partner at a vital stage in our programme, and want to hear from evaluators who share an understanding of how communities can drive social change and how funders and agencies like ours can support them to build power without reducing their agency. 

Before beginning the project we held a workshop with both The Social Change Agency and BUD as well as our Impact on Urban Health to identify the key impact and outcomes we want to see from the project. We have a draft evaluation framework available. 

We are seeking to build on this and: 

• Develop and run evaluation framework to measure the success of all parts of the project, including the leadership course, the funding and organising support and the sustainability framework.
• Maximize learning from the evaluation to increase impact and measure success of the project for both organisations and the funder. 
• Develop a model to measure long-term impact for the community groups we work with

Practical outcomes can include, but not be limited to:

• Design and implement a Learning & Evaluation framework.
• Develop systems for measuring impact and evaluating outcomes and implement them.
• Facilitate and co create a sense making strategy for the complex nature of the project.
• Create an impact report to share with the stakeholders and the sector. 

This evaluation aims to facilitate the team’s learning and culminate in a final report that can be shared externally. The evaluation will need to reflect on what the team has done so far, while looking forward to a larger learning question: Does our/this approach to building out civic power help to end health and wellbeing inequities in these boroughs?

We will focus on ensuring that our methods aren’t extractive when speaking with participants/community members, aiming to also provide a space for reflection for them (and compensating).

Hypothesis

If we provide the infrastructure – through leadership training, collaborative network building, seed funding, and other supports – to resource early stage and unincorporated leaders and groups already organizing in their communities who otherwise would not have access where they live, then these groups will bring these skills/resources to their communities and will be able to build civic power that contributes to ending health and wellbeing inequities. 

Learning questions (open for revision)

1. How do the different project components coalesce into a meaningful whole for participants? How are participants experiencing the components? What impact do these have individually and collectively?
   a) Leadership development training
   b) Network/peer-to-peer skill sharing
   c) Seed funding for early stage or unincorporated groups
   d) Other supports– consulting, tool development, etc.
2. How is SCA/BUD’s shift to a collaborative leadership style showing up in the work? What does collaborative leadership make possible for the work/participants/communities?
3. How does this approach to building out civic strength contribute to ending health and wellbeing inequities in these boroughs
4. What can the philanthropy sector as a whole learn from this approach?

Although we understand that evaluators will bring their own expertise into this scope, we think that the evaluation should fall into roughly 4 phases.

Phase 1: Listening & collaborative design

In Phase 1, working with the SCA/BUD/IoUH teams to build on and design a right-sized and rigorous evaluation and learning approach, including key questions, methods, participants, and timeline.

Phase 2: Data collection & analysis

In Phase 2, putting the approach into action by designing data collection instruments (likely interviews, potentially focus groups and a brief survey), collecting the data, and doing ongoing analysis so that initial findings can be shared back in 1 or 2 facilitated learning sessions. This includes a focused reflection session with the team Depending on the final learning questions arrived at in Phase 1, this may include a focused reflection session with the SCA/BUD teams to dig into our collaborative approach, which would then inform how to ask participants/community members about their experience of this work.

Phase 3: Synthesis & sensemaking

In Phase 3, interrogating the analyses from Phase 2 and design a final sensemaking session for SCA, BUD, and IoUH, including an additional sensemaking session with participants/community members as well to surface their insights about this work and incorporate these into the findings.

Phase 4: Reporting

In Phase 4, final report that can be shared externally.

April
Agree perimeters and timeline

April > August
Sensemaking development of framework and evaluation

October 2023
Final evaluation report

Please send in a brief proposal of no more than 4 pages with your proposed approach, your track record of similar work, and a budget broken down by approximate tasks against your day rate to rachel@thesocialchangeagency.org 

Deadline:  Midday – 31/03/2023

Budget: £20,000 + VAT

If you need any accessibility accommodations for this application please do not hesitate to contact us on hello@thesocialchangeagency.org or by calling 0333 200 5837 and we will be happy to provide you with those accommodations.