The Regeneration Game

Social capital theory suggests that if you create strong social networks between people and their neighbourhoods then this can encourage neighbourhood renewal. The task of challenging deprivation has led the London Borough of Newham to reach out to its youth population for answers.

The borough’s aim is to ensure young people are healthy, educated, safe, and have high aspirations for employment and good self-esteem. The social networks created through such endeavours can then boost aspirations and encourage people into education and jobs.

Newham has one of the largest allocations of Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF) in London, and the NRF is currently being positively channelled into this endeavour. A package of sporting and cultural projects are aiming to deflect young people away from crime, improve educational attainment, encourage a healthy lifestyle and promote community cohesion.

Coupled with a higher than average proportion of young people and the second most diverse multi-cultural population in the UK, the borough’s community and culture projects demonstrate Newham’s commitment to improving the quality of life of all of its residents.
Newham Culture and Community Neighbourhood Renewal Fund programme is already supporting marked improvements in Newham, including narrowing the gap with respect to the national averages in education and employment. For 2005, youth crime is down by 15% and GCSE results for 2004 showed a significant improvement on the previous year.

Newham commissioned research to find innovative ways of tracking the specific impact of its NRF projects on these broader changes, and in particular to assess hard to measure ‘softer outcomes’.

The research

The consultancy, ECOTEC, was charged with evaluating the success of the programme which runs from 2004 – 2006. The first step for us was to categorise the types of outcomes that the programme was likely to achieve based upon our experience of regeneration projects and good practice elsewhere (we have identified social cohesion, social inclusion, community capacity, improved health and personal development as key outcome areas). These link to Newham’s five main NRF impact targets:

• Raising the level of educational attainment;

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• Raising the levels of health or perceived levels of health in Newham residents;
• Reducing offending levels in young people;
• Increasing community cohesion in the borough;
• Increasing levels of support for the Olympics within
Newham.

While it had been easy for Newham to measure projects in terms of outputs and achievement in completing project milestones, it was difficult to show that the projects were having a real impact on the community. Were they changing people’s lives – were they having the desired result on a large scale? And how could this be proved?

A benchmark for performance indicators?
We looked at established and innovative models that projects and government departments use to measure similar outcomes, including the Quality of Life indicators set by the Audit Commission and the Community Development Foundation, and the Youth Justice Board’s Risk and Protection Factors Model. Into the equation was added the Home Office Community Cohesion indicators. This mountain of quantifiable indicators was then condensed into a practical toolkit to allow Newham to comprehensively measure the impact of their projects, according to set outcome measures. By linking indicators to defined outcomes that are traditionally difficult to measure we have developed a menu of indicators for measuring the impacts of culture and community projects that could be used universally across the UK.

A series of focus groups with NRF project managers was held to find out which of these outcomes were relevant to projects and why. It was found that some projects will have multiple impacts – not only on crime but also on educational attainment, for example, or increased connection to the community as well as encouraging a healthy lifestyle. From this we were able to gauge which potential outcomes projects were likely to deliver – this was then linked back to the menu of indicators we had devised.
We then took a sample of around fifteen NRF projects which were representative of the broad range of interventions funded through Newham’s NRF programme. A set of survey questionnaires were then tailored for each project based upon the indicator menu to help capture impact data. Five point likert scales were employed to help capture fine grained changes and differing beneficiary perspectives and experiences.

Project beneficiaries are currently being surveyed to explore the impact of these projects. We are also using community volunteers from Newham’s local population, thereby capacity building the local community with research skills. The volunteers were given a half day training session on the basics of community research. We stressed the importance of surveying a range of age, gender and ethnic groups to represent Newham’s diversity. The work of the community researchers is ongoing, but to date the researchers have been successful in meeting their high targets for interviewing a large number of their peers at numerous NRF-supported events, clubs and classes in Newham. Questionnaire data is designed to be complemented with a smaller number of in-depth beneficiary interviews, and we will be capturing this important qualitative data over the summer.

Another technique that we have employed is a biographical diary. Young people on Newham’s NRF funded Cultural and Recreational Qualifications Programme have been provided with diaries to help capture their changing feelings and aspirations on an ongoing basis. This will provide us with unique qualitative insights into ‘distance travelled’ amongst a group of young offenders.

The questionnaires are also designed to have a long shelf-life. Newham’s Culture and Community department can use them in future years to help measure project impacts as well as measure changes over time.
Case study: “Under the Stars”

In early September 2004 Newham Council hosted the “Under the Stars” weekend of live music in East Ham. Under the Stars is part of Newham’s Social Cohesion NRF theme. The event took place over three evenings with a range of musical themes from Swing to Asian, culminating with a “Prom in the Park” Classical event on the final evening.

The aims of the event were to bring people from across Newham together and to enhance their feeling of ‘connection to the community’, as well as improving access to quality music and dance in the borough.

Fieldworkers attended two of the three nights of the event in order to carry out survey interviews. The questions drew upon key indicators from the evaluation toolkit in order to identify the impact of the event on social cohesion, social inclusion, community capacity and improving local image and identity. The questionnaire also included a set of questions focusing on Newham residents in order to provide a baseline of their perceptions of connection to the community and accessibility of local facilities.

Attendance at the event was almost double that of the previous year, in itself a very positive outcome, with 84% rating the event as good or excellent. Nearly all of the attendees felt that events like this help to promote better community spirit, whilst encouraging the local community to meet and mix with other people. Of those surveyed, 94% also believed that events like Under the Stars provide more for families and young people to do in the area, a key indicator for both community capacity and youth diversion.

The findings from “Under the Stars” provide a snapshot of how social capital is being strengthened amongst residents, and in particular young people in Newham. Evidence gathered so far demonstrates that encouraging more involvement through sports, art and culture can lead to increased social capital amongst young people, with obvious benefits for community cohesion and social inclusion in deprived neighbourhoods.

The Way Forward

Our research is ongoing until 2006. The next steps are to carry out face-to-face interviews with beneficiaries to enhance our findings with qualitative data. The research will allow Newham to demonstrate the impact of their projects as well as identify which are working particularly well and how to make improvements. The detail of the research backs up what the borough is doing and shows them paths to take for future improvement, and what should be supported through statutory funding. Newham continues to demonstrate that social capital and community capacity building have important parts to play in any regeneration programme.

Jonathan France is a senior consultant at ECOTEC Research and Consulting Ltd.

Visit: www.ecotec.com

Contact: jonathan.france@ecotec.com top