Our Head of Insight, Impact and Learning, Nicola Frost, has been visiting Community Food Hubs funded through our partnership with Devon County Council’s public health team. The two-year project is only just getting underway but, as Nicola explores in this blog post, if we want to truly understand its value and how to describe it, it’s never too early to start evaluating.
“I think we involved the evaluators too early,” someone reflected to me recently, pondering a less-than-satisfactory commissioning experience. “There wasn’t anything to evaluate that early in the project.”
I thought about the visits I’ve been making over the last week or so to the five Community Food Hubs initiatives funded through Devon Community Foundation’s collaboration with Devon County Council’s (DCC) public health team. The grants are very new, marking the beginning of a two-year journey together with the funded organisations and partnerships, as they build on their previous work to support fair access to affordable food in their communities, and develop the organisational structures needed to help sustain that work into the future.
These visits have not been focused on seeing activities in action, taking engaging photos, or gathering quotes from grateful beneficiaries. I (with my DCC colleagues) have sat in cramped offices*, clustered round kitchen benches and unpacked surplus food deliveries (there was a LOT of lettuce). The purpose is to understand contexts and perspectives, and to learn more about where this work fits in with organisations’ expertise and strategic direction. Before they’ve done it.
On paper, the funded work is very varied. One grantholder is starting from scratch, building a new set of relationships, while another is approaching its twentieth birthday. One is situated in a busy part of Exeter, another in a small moorland town. Some focus on skills, some on affordable access to food, others on nutrition and education. An evaluator’s nightmare, surely: an exercise in comparing apples with oranges.
However, even at this early stage, our conversations have revealed emerging commonality and connection, albeit approached from different directions. One project is based in a school, using cooking courses as a means of connecting outwards with the community; others want to work with schools in their patch, and are at various stages of engagement. There’s a pervasive interest in avoiding the stigma often associated with food support provision, though potential solutions to this appeal to divergent narratives: for some it’s reducing food waste, for another it’s improving health.
My job is to walk alongside the grantholders as they set their goals, make their plans, build their partnerships. It is to understand the models behind the activity: what are the key ingredients for functional place-based community food hubs in different geographic and demographic contexts? Who do they benefit and how? What are we learning about how to do this better? The only way I know to do that is to be in at the get-go, to be learning and reflecting, together, in real time. Hindsight is not going to cut it here.
Next step will be to bring the grantholders together, to build peer relationships that will enable sharing of good practice, or joint frustration, or observations about how this work intersects with wider systems. All of this before, I suspect, the faintest whiff of an ‘outcome’. If evaluation is really about understanding what there is to value and working out how to describe that value (hint: it is), then that can never start too early.
