At our last Delivery Partners meeting, researcher David Woodcock came along to talk us through his new idea: a project called Volunteer Listeners. Volunteer listeners is a way of evaluating our work using people rather than paper.

You may be thinking ‘Why do we need another lot of evaluation? Surely the questionnaires we use are enough?’ The reason we are looking at this approach is that it adds a human angle to the sometimes impersonal evaluation we give to the Big Lottery. It allows us to hear from the people involved what they think about what we are doing and whether we are doing it right.

David’s idea is simple; it involves conversations between project participants and ‘volunteer listeners’. We will use partnership organisations to recruit participants and then work the individual stories into one composite that can be shared.

The volunteer listeners will be tasked with listening and capturing the stories and they will be given help and support with this.

This is an exciting way of capturing people’s opinions, feedback and experience in a more person-centric approach. It will allow a real story to come out, beyond the constraints of paperwork and forms. The new Volunteer Listeners project should work alongside the existing evaluation and nicely complement it.

In order to bring this idea to life, we need people who are interested in becoming volunteer listeners. We will provide full training and support and make sure the participants have been identified beforehand for them.

If you or any of your volunteers or participants are interested in taking part please come along to our first steering group meeting. It will be on the 22nd March 10am-12pm at the board Room, Josephs Well, LS3 1AB

We would love to see you there. Please get in touch with Hanna to find out more: hanna@opforum.org.uk or 0113 244 1697.