Since the inception of Everyone Here, West Cumbria’s Arts Council England-funded Creative People and Places programme, the University of Lancashire has assumed the role of Learning Partner, which is split between John Scanlan and Ursula Pool (our colleague in the School of Health, Social Work and Sport).
As an arts programme, Everyone Here can boast two unique features: one is its Citizen’s Jury (known as the Jury for Joy) and the other is its Community Evaluation Group, which is a sub-group of the Jury who undertake to evaluate the work of the programme.
John has been closely observing the workings of the Community Evaluation group since it first met and began to develop its novel methods, which aim to create an environment within which members of the community who are commissioning arts programming can better understand the processes involved. Something else they soon became aware of was that evaluation was something rather different than their preconceptions might have led them to expect …