Future Pathways and Matter of Focus

Day

Wednesday 8 November

Time slot

09:30-10:30

This event took place 6 months ago

Room

Harris suite
Wheelchair accessible

Contact

Louise Hall

Topics

Evaluation & impact Families and communities

Overall aim

This event aims to:

• share what we have learned about evaluating relationship-focused services
• explore ways of evidencing a relational approach and applying this evidence to decision-making
• discuss the benefits of centring relationships in a theory of change.
• share our learning about the impact of trust on individual and service outcomes.

Description

Fostering effective relationships is a key aspect of the change process. Trusting relationships with people supported by services and with partners contribute to improved outcomes for individuals and services. Understanding how we build and maintain relationships is integral to planning, commissioning, and delivering person-centred services. Evaluating the relational approach that a service adopts also helps cultivate an understanding of the service’s impact at scale. Yet it can be challenging to interrogate our assumptions about the relationships we build with people and partners.

Future Pathways supports people who were abused or neglected while in care in Scotland. Future Pathways works with a network of partners and existing services to enable people to progress their personal outcomes. We have worked with Matter of Focus since 2018 to evaluate the relational approach we take to working with people registered with us, and with our partners. Matter of Focus helps services make better use of their data to learn, improve and tell an evidenced story of the difference they make.

We have worked together to surface and systematically interrogate the assumptions we held about our approach and its impact. This evidence-based evaluation has enabled us to refine a model of support which makes a meaningful difference to the people we support and wider services.

During this workshop, we will share why we invested in this evaluation approach at Future Pathways, and how it has benefitted our understanding of our impact. We will share how we have woven our relational approach into the theory of change we use to evaluate Future Pathways. Finally, we will share what we have learned together about evaluating relational services, drawing on examples from Future Pathways’ work with people and partners.

Who was the event aimed at?

Directors

Who spoke at this event?

Flora Henderson (Alliance Manager, In Care Survivors Alliance)
Louise Hall (Impact & Evaluation Lead, Future Pathways)
Ailsa Cook (Co-director, Matter of Focus)