BIG Lottery Fund Wellbeing Conference 2012

Date: Tuesday 4^th and Wednesday 5^th September 2012

Organised by: BIG Lottery Fund

Venue: BIG Lottery Offices, Newcastle

Post by: Lawrence Milner, Programme Officer

Last week Maggie and I attended BIG Lottery Fund’s annual Wellbeing conference in Newcastle. The Wellbeing conferences provide a great opportunity to learn from the other 16 national Wellbeing Portfolios and keep up to speed with policy developments and the current state of the Health agenda.   

Peter Wanless, Chief Executive of the BIG Lottery Fund opened the event explaining how the National Wellbeing Evaluation will be used to help influence policy, commissioners, and authorities including Public Health England. Peter was keen that the learning and messages from the Portfolio are shared as widely as possibly by all involved with the Wellbeing Programme.

The Centrefor Local Economic Strategies (CLES) went on to update us on the outcomes of the national evaluation which is based on a sample of 50 projects using questionnaires and 19 case studies. Projects with greatest impact tended to:

• Take holistic approaches looking at all aspects of wellbeing were more successful.
• Disseminated learning to secondary beneficiaries.
• Were community led.

Benefits of the Portfolio approach have also been identified including capacity building, sharing of learning, provision of datasets and the skills to embed evaluation within projects. Further details on the national evaluation can be found here.

Following an inspiring talk from the Altogether Better portfolio and two of their CommunityHealth Champions, we heard from the Social Investment Business Group about the increasing importance of needing to measure project’s social value for securing investment and the emerging field of social investment bonds. As traditional types of funding become this is certainly one to what for the future particularly as the BIG Society Bank develops.

On day two Geoff Wilkinson, BIG Lottery England Committee Member updated us on develops at BIG including the Fulfilling Lives Portfolio, Older People Programmes and BIG Local Programme along with their plans to explore social investment, in a distinctive yet complementary way to other providers.

David Robinson from Community Links called for a revolution in help us build a society that prevents problems from occurring rather than one that, as now, copes with the consequences. In times of financial austerity David advocated the shift in funding to preventative services to reduce the burden on acute provision. More details can be found at here.

A commissioning workshop identified experiences and common themes, including the need to take a flexible approach when working in different areas; to have concise information on impact, evaluation and benefit and the need to build personal relationships at varying levels within the Commissioning Authority.

Finally we heard from Roise Maguire from the New Economic Foundation on the ONS development of the national Wellbeing measures and NEF guide for measuring wellbeing which can be found at http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/measuring-well-being

The Future of Well-being – A Big Lottery Fund Learning Event

Date of the event: 14th and 15th March 2011
Organised by: The Big Lottery Fund
Venue: The Royal National Institute for the Blind, Birmingham
Post by: Lawrence Milner, Programme Officer

"The Future of Well-being" was the title for Big Lottery Fund’s second learning event for grant holders of Well-being funding which took place on 14th and 15th March 2011 in Birmingham.

Following the welcomes and introductions it was straight down to business with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) updating us with the second year interim findings from the national evaluation, which will be available on the CLES wellbeing website from next week.

Next Peter Wanless, Big Lottery’s CEO, reflected on the progress of the wellbeing programme to date, before touching on other priority areas of work such as the recently launched “Improving Futures” programme. You can read Peter's blog post on the New Start magazine site about the Well-being programme's evalaution here, and there are some findings from the Well-being programmes evaluation here - Well-being in England: Making a BIG difference

Before lunch the Ramblers Association guided us on a short walk around Birmingham.

Well-being and the Big Society was the thought provoking topic introduced by Julian Dobson (Big Society in the North and co-founder of New Start magazine) when we were challenged with thinking about the positive aspects of the BIG society agenda. Next Phil Conway from Cool2Care, a rapidly expanding social enterprise, focused our minds on the future and shared his experiences of adopting a very business focused approach.

Day two was opened by Reverend Dr Alan Billings (England Committee, Big Lottery) who talked about some of the challenges faced by the voluntary and community sector in light of government funding cutbacks and the resultant increased competition for lottery resources. Victoria Bradford informed us about wellbeing policy updates before the Office for National Statistics explained on how there were developing new measures for well-being further details of which can be found at www.ons.gov.uk/well-being

It was then onto workshops including looking at measuring and articulating “Impact” introduced by Claire Henderson involved with Mind’s Time to Change campaign and the Food for Life Partnership, led by the Soil Association, including thought on the need to communicate evaluation findings in advance of project closure to aid sustainability discussion. Finally we looked at some techniques for measuring those important softer outcomes which projects achieve such as behavioral change with Sarah Frost from the Altogether Better programme.

This was hugely relevant for Target: Wellbeing, as we have developed a complex and thorough system of evaluation over the few years our projects have been running. From evaluation questionnaires and an online registration database developed by the North West Public Health Observatory and a process evaluation led by the University of Central Lancashire, to a whole range of varied and bespoke tools used to meet the needs of the specific projects and beneficiaries. We’ll be launching several reports from a range of evaluators shortly, so if this is an area you are interested in keep an eye on the resources section of our website, and if you are keen to discuss Target: Wellbeing’s evaluation tools and systems themselves contact Rob Squires at rob.squire@groundwork.org.uk or on 0161 237 3200.

All in all a very thought provoking and enjoyable couple of days and a great chance to once again meet colleagues from other programmes and share our learning.