In our latest Team Blog, Jill Parker talks about how our Summerfield Community Chest project is developing an impact and learning framework.

Jill explores why a framework is important for the project and what it looks like in practice...

Gloucestershire VCS Alliance is working in partnership with The Summerfield Charitable Trust to take forward a pioneering investment strategy that aims to improve the lives of thousands of people in the county. This partnership is known as The Summerfield Community Chest.

The project is supported by a Task Group made up of VCSE leaders who contribute their professional expertise and local insight and are responsible for co-designing investment proposals with us and local communities.

Why have an impact and learning framework?

From an early stage there have been a lot of stakeholders in this project, each with their own idea of what good looks like and where investments should be made. Bringing together these people, ideas and interests in a way that enables us all to contribute our very best is key to reaching recommendations that work for communities and organisations.

This is not an easy path to tread. A key step along the way has been the development of an impact and learning framework which has knitted the threads of these ideas into a coherent whole. This is about how we want to be and how we want others to experience the project as it evolves. It’s a framework to which we can return when we meet challenges, when we are making decisions and when we need to check we are on course.

What does the framework look like?

The framework is the result of a workshop involving a representative group of stakeholders and facilitated by our learning partner Jamie Pett. It is based on five indicators which describe the impact we intend to make. These are:

• Hospitality: We build relationships and create a sense of belonging and agency by being kind, positive and welcoming.
• Active Learning: We change our assumptions and plans in response to co-production, evidence and reflection. We increase our capacity to do this kind of work in Gloucestershire.
• Collaboration: People, including those who are marginalised, who deeply understand their communities are able to decide together how resources are distributed, and build interdependent relationships through working together.
• Tangibility: People in communities are able to see and feel both the process and real outcomes.
• Counterculture: The cultural norms in the voluntary sector shift from short-term, competitive and paternalistic to preventative, selfless and trust in citizens. This influences the public sector and other funders.

So what?

The framework has given us something that holds the overarching project together, with all its strands, stakeholders, relationships and workstreams. It is more fundamental than any formal agreement or process because it captures something that is important to all of us.

What’s next?

From here we are developing a series of measures so that The Summerfield Community Chest as a whole and the projects it funds can be evaluated against this framework. This helps keep us focussed because ‘what is measured becomes what matters’.

Find out more

If you’d like to find out more about The Summerfield Community Chest, please check out our dedicated webpage: Summerfield Charitable Trust project

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