CASE STUDY
Yarrabah Circles of Care
What was the challenge?
Indigenous-led organisation, Circles of Care Yarrabah wanted to develop their services to better reflect the cultural needs of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people they work with.
How did we help solve the problem?
Circles of Care Yarrabah is a service that helps local families and schools work together to achieve positive outcomes for children’s learning and wellbeing
Circles of Care approached us to help explore how the program could better suit the needs of local Indigenous children and their families.
We worked with the community leaders to co-design a ‘story of change’ and evaluation methodology using the Interplay wellbeing framework and validated indicators to measure things the community cared about.
Our indicators are culturally responsive and scientifically validated, ensuring their ability to contribute to building a robust evidence base.
We built the selected indicators into our technology platform, to create a mobile survey app tailored for the Circles of Care clients and partners.
Continuously updated evaluation data is then analysed and shown visually on an Interplay Map that keeps the community and funders on the same page, informing their collective decision-making about how to create impact.
We value strengths based approaches and are passionate about building evaluation capabilities at the grassroots level in communities.
This project is an example where we've collaborated with a community service, providing support and access to our evaluation tools to build community-led evaluation capability. We embraced our values of shared learning to help empower the community (service) to evaluate for impact.
We are working together building evaluation capacity and sharing knowledge along the way, to evaluate the impact of the program and help understand how things like empowerment, culture and community contribute to outcomes.
In doing so, we are able to assist Circles of Care Yarrabah and the local community to create a visual representation of the programs evaluation and broader contribution to overall wellbeing of its participants.
Services
Co-designed a ‘story of change’ and evaluation methodology
Build evaluation capabilities at the grassroots level in communities
Created a tailored mobile survey app
Analysis of continuously updated evaluation data to inform decision making
Evaluation data displayed visually on an Interplay Map
“I found the whole process very easy to follow. Myself and community workers felt that they had been listened to when you received their feedback on the survey questions they wanted to ask…
With your help we were able to achieve what was required for evaluation, ready to commence, in a very short period of time and with proper consultation.”
— Margaret Osmond runs the Aboriginal service
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