Lloyds Bank Foundation Development Team wanted a learning partner to walk alongside them as they developed new ways of working with local communities and small charities to re-imagine how services could be designed, funded and delivered to become more resilient and sustainable. They wanted a partner who would facilitate their learning, act as a critical friend and apply developmental evaluation methods to their work.
We are currently six years into our learning partnership. We work closely with the team to reflect on their actions, decisions and learning using a mix of informal and formal reflection and feedback sessions. We also gather insights from the charities, communities and other partners they work with, to understand how the team’s support contributes to them making change in their local services and working relationships.
It became clear that we all needed a tool for capturing the nuance of how local systems were changing and maturing to enable communities to achieve their ambitions. We drew together a range of existing evidence and the unfolding experiences within the six communities the Foundation is working alongside, to design a set of rubrics to describe the different dimensions that contribute to a mature system; one where services are designed, resourced and delivered sustainably, with local people’s needs at heart. We call this the System Maturity Model.
We’ve worked closely with the communities to define the change they want to see, build a Theory of Change and to create plans for learning from and evaluating their work.
As we move into the seventh year of the learning partnership, we’re focusing on synthesising the concrete lessons we can now share about how to support community-led change.
In the spirit of continuous learning, we share our findings frequently with the team, including quarterly formal feedback sessions and informal feedback as needed. We also produce a report at the end of each year summarising how the work has developed over the year, key learning points that can be shared, and areas for attention in the coming year.
In November 2023 the Foundation published our report ‘Learning From The First Three Years’, which you can read here.
We also wrote a blog on the Foundation’s website about the methods we’ve used to evaluate the work. You can this here.
The team uses our insights to:
We’re all still learning together.
