Evaluation Case Study Examples

Community based health initiatives - 2003: Lisburn YMCA's Totally You Project and Opportunity Youth's Men Only Project

CENI has been involved in completing a number of evaluations that have illustrated good practice in health-oriented initiatives. Lisburn YMCA’s ‘Totally You’ project promotes a holistic and user-friendly approach to health with young people in the area, who would largely be marginalized from mainstream provision. A similar project, ‘Men Only’, is run by Opportunity Youth and promotes young men’s sexual health. Both of these projects were funded by the North & West Belfast Health & Social Services Trust and were meeting needs or gaps in provision, identified through current research on issues such as teenage pregnancy, drug and alcohol misuse. They were also developing priority areas of work and approaches set out in the DHSSPS strategy document, ‘Investing for Health’, particularly in relation to ‘working with communities’ and promoting ‘progress through partnership’.

Dr Olga Elder, Director of the Family Planning Service with N&W Belfast Health & Social Services Trust said that the evaluations of the Totally You and Men Only projects, for Lisburn YMCA and Opportunity Youth respectively, were invaluable in that they enabled the projects ‘to better meet their strategic objectives and ensure that their work continued to be congruent with the policy priorities of the Health Service as set out in the documents Investing for Health and Teenage Pregnancy’. Furthermore, the recommendations contained in the evaluations ‘enabled the projects to improve their operational effectiveness through identifying opportunities to re-organise and reshape their activities and services to meet changing circumstances’. This ensured, according to Dr. Elder, that both projects were ‘better informed to optimise the efficient use of their resources and enabled them to work more effectively with those young people who were most in need’. This in turn was instrumental in securing further funding from the Trust to continue the work of both projects.

Greater Shankill 21 Initiative - Highlighting the benefits of partnership working

Another very different but equally important piece of work was recently completed for the North and West Belfast Health Action Zone. This was an evaluation of the Greater Shankill 21 Initiative which was set up in August 2001 to address the medium-term needs of the people of the Shankill area of Belfast following the feud of the previous year. This cross-sectoral, inter-agency body was chaired by the Leader and subsequently the Development worker for the HAZ. The remit of the project was to provide a holistic approach to the needs of the community. However, the process of joint working, in itself, contributed to a wider regeneration agenda being advanced on the Shankill. Caroline Bloomfield, Development Worker with the HAZ, and Chairperson of Greater Shankill 21, commented that the evaluation of this initiative was ‘a very useful tool to demonstrate the benefits to be gained from community organisations and statutory agencies working together in real partnership. The evaluation has captured the learning, both in terms of process and impact and, we hope, shows that Greater Shankill 21 is a model that can be replicated in other areas’.