Evaluating your therapeutic gardening project is one of the key ways of providing evidence to funders and commissioning and referral bodies such as NHS, GP's and activity referral schemes.
Measuring the outcomes of your project can be done in many ways.
Below are links to tools and resources you may find useful when trying to decide how to evaluate your project.
How to decide how to evaluate your project?
Click here to see Evaluation Pathway
Which tool to use?
A guide for evaluating health and wellbeing outcomes for community growing programmes can be found at https://www.sustainweb.org/publications/whichtooltouse/
Evaluation Support Scotland provide the Evaluation Pathway planning tool and related resources at http://www.evaluationsupportscotland.org.uk/evaluation/index.asp . The Evaluation Pathway provides a framework for planning your evaluation, taking you through all the stages in the evaluation cycle. It features free guides and case studies, as well as pointers on how to start, decide what methods to use and what to consider when planning time and resources for the evaluation process. Evaluation Support Scotland also provide training sessions on various aspects of project evaluation. For further information see their events page at http://www.evaluationsupportscotland.org.uk/events.asp
Social Impact Scotland www.socialimpactscotland.org.uk is a web resource dedicated to supporting you to better understand your social impact, for Third Sector Organisations, Funders and Investors in the Third Sector, and Public Sector organisations.The site provides information on a range of philosophies, methodologies, tools and approaches to understanding and measuring social impact, as well as information on outcomes approaches to commissioning, designing and improving services and projects within communities. Developed and maintained by Forth Sector Development, the site is a legacy of the Scottish Government SROI Project, and retains comprehensive information on SROI, which can be accessed from this site here.
SROI report on Solstice horticultural nursery, a social firm based in Aberdeenshire employing people with long-standing mental health issues, see http://www.solsticenurseries.co.uk/social-return-on-investment-report/
Many examples of SROI reports on green space projects are available at Greenspace Scotland http://www.greenspacescotland.org.uk/sroi.aspx
Examples of evaluation frameworks and guides:
greenspace Scotland can help you evaluate your impact using Social Return on Investment (SROI), transform your spaces using Community Placemaking, prepare plans to climate-proof your greenspace, or create a growing map of your town to find new places to grow fruit and veg. Contact us on info@greenspacescotland.org.uk or 01786 465934 to find out about the services, support and training that greenspace scotland staff can provide to help you make a difference to your local greenspace. For downloads and further information see http://www.greenspacescotland.org.uk/leap.aspx
The Scottish Community Development Centre has developed the LEAP framework software to enable you to plan and evaluate your project. For general information on LEAP see http://www.planandevaluate.com/
SCDC training and support brochure for 2012-14 contains information on training and support relating to community engagement, planning and evaluation, community capacity building, community-led health and community-led action research. New resources include online versions of LEAP and VOiCE as well as their ‘Building Stronger Communities' tool. For more information on these and other resources, download the SCDC Training and Support brochure now by clicking here.
If you would like to inquire about any of these services, please contact David Allan (Head of Programmes) on
0141 248 1924/1964 or david@scdc.org.uk
For practictioners in Mental Health :
Mental Health Improvement evaluation guides are available from NHS Health Scotland are available at www.healthscotland.com/mental-health-publications.aspx
Scottish Recovery Indicator SRI 2 enables mental health practitioners to provide ever more recovery focused services. We know that people working in mental health services want to demonstrate their commitment to recovery see http://www.sri2.net/
Examples of evaluation reports:
Health Scotland have a searchable database of health improvement initiative evaluation reports at http://www.healthscotland.com/resources/evaluation/search.aspx
People Powered Health Co-production Catalogue
As part of their People Powered health programme, Nesta have published a People Powered Health Co-production Catalogue. Produced by the New Economics Foundation (nef), the document brings together a range of case studies, resources and other information on co-production in health settings as well as in other sectors, in the UK and internationally. The purpose of the catalogue is to enable practitioners to reflect on their own practice and the extent to which that represents coproduction, and to enable them to learn about co-production practice. The case studies are predominantly in the areas of health and social care, and include three Scottish projects, Comas, Waverly Care and Routes out of Prison (RooP). The resource also lists further literature and co-production tools. Download it from Nesta for free at http://www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/pphcat.pdf
Examples of therapeutic gardening project evaluations
We would like to build up a library of therapeutic gardening project evaluations to reflect the broad range of projects and evaluations.
If you have a project evaluation you'd like to share with the network, please contact us at info@trellisscotland.org.uk