Creative Lives was initiated by The Audience Business and the City of Edinburgh Council. It aimed to celebrate the scale and scope of the learning and participation sector in Edinburgh.
30 cultural organisations participated in the project providing information on their activity including the type of activity and levels of participation.
Key findings included:
This data provided a strategic overview of the activity for the first time. This enabled strategic interventions to be made to increase levels of activity where they were low and allow cultural organisations to effectively direct their activity.
As part of the project the participating cultural organisations came together as a network to share their experiences and expertise. These sharing sessions led to the development of new partnerships and joint activity.
Clair was the project manager for Creative Lives and worked with a steering group to devise and deliver the project. The findings were presented to stakeholders and shared with councillors.
The Festival and King's Theatres Edinburgh were awarded 3 year funding by the Life Changes Trust to create a dementia friendly community at the theatres. The project involved staff training, capital developments and the creation of a programme of activities and events for people living with dementia. Clair worked with the theatres to evaluate the Forget Me Not project. Objectives were set with the Life Changes Trust and the evaluation sought to identify whether these objectives had been met.
The evaluation included the following:
Throughout the consultation Clair worked closely with the Forget Me Not project coordinator to understand how the project was evolving and to ensure that the evaluation continued to meet the right needs as the project inevitably changed. The final report identified the outcomes for all the measures including some areas where further development was required to fully achieve a successful project.
Clair learnt a huge amount as a result of the project which has informed all of her research going forward. This includes the importance of working with the community at the heart of a research project to ensure that it is tailored to their requirements and that the evaluation is flexible to respond to changes in the wider project or where an evaluation method does not provide the results expected.
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