‘Our Bigger Story’ evaluation of Big Local

Research and evaluation play a key role in helping us gather evidence to understand what happens when communities gain power over resources.

The purpose of Our Bigger Story is to capture change at an individual, group and community level, and to understand how change happens and how it can be sustained.

Not only does this help us improve the delivery of the Big Local programme, it also builds the case for community control and increases understanding of how best to deliver long-term, resident-led, place-based programmes.

Evaluation reports and outputs are available on the Our Bigger Story website. Films, animations, photographs and audio created as part of the project are available on the Our Bigger Story website and the study’s Vimeo channel.

You can also access key outputs directly using the links below:

• 2024: Understanding success in Big Local – evaluation report
• 2023: A delicate balance: National support provision in the Big Local programme– evaluation report
• 2022: Companion papers on Building Big Local Futures: Building systems of community connection and control (paper 1) with film, and Towards legacies for people and places (paper 2) with film
• 2021: Building on Local – evaluation report and blog
• 2020: Big Local as Change Agent – evaluation report, film, animation and blog
• 2019: Big Local: Reflections from ‘the Outside In’ – thematic paper
• 2019: Big Local: Reflections on ‘resident-led’ change – thematic paper, film and blog
• 2019: Big Local: Reflections on Community Leadership – thematic paper and blog
• 2017: Big Local: Beyond the Early Years – evaluation report and blog
• 2016: Our Bigger Story: The First Chapter – interim evaluation report, film and blog

You can also read other news and blogs about the evaluation below.

• 2019: Our Bigger Story hits 80 films – blog
• 2017: Seeing is believing: learning from multimedia evaluation – blog

Our Bigger Story uses multimedia methods (films and photographs) alongside more traditional methods (such as interviews and focus groups) to capture changes in communities as they happen over a long period of time (10 years).

It is a participatory study, supporting those involved to build their skills, learning and capacity to generate their own content, as they record their experiences though blogs, photographs and images, audio, digital stories, film, reflective journals and other media.

The study is designed to help us learn about the Big Local programme and to measure progress against the four Big Local outcomes:

• Communities will be better able to identify local needs and take action in response to them.
• People will have increased skills and confidence, so that they continue to identify and respond to needs in the future.
• The community will make a difference to the needs it prioritises.
• People will feel that their area is an even better place to live.

Our Bigger Story is also helping us to test the hypothesis about the Big Local programme that we introduced in 2018 to guide our research and evaluation at Local Trust.

Our hypothesis is:

Long term funding and support to build capacity gives residents in hyper-local areas agency to take decisions and to act to create positive and lasting change.

The study also explores the ethos of Big Local and Local Trust’s progress in applying a community development approach to delivering the programme.

Our Bigger Story is a longitudinal project, working with the same 15 Big Local areas throughout.

In 2015, Big Local areas were invited to express an interest in participating in the evaluation. 15 were selected using a sampling framework to ensure a diversity of areas, based on:

• geography (a mixture of urban, rural and coastal communities)
• focus of activity
• when they joined the Big Local programme
• diversity of community characteristics.

The 15 participating areas are: Barrowcliff; Birchfield; Blackpool Revoe; Bountagu (Bounces Montagu); Catton Grove; Grassland Hasmoor; Growing Together (Northampton East); Hanwell, Copley Close; Lawrence Weston; Northfleet North; Radstock and Westfield; Ramsey; Three Parishes; Westfield Estate and Whitley Bay.

The study is currently in its fourth and final phase, lasting from 2023 to 2025.

In this phase, the evaluation will focus on the meaning and enablers of ‘success’ for a community-led programme like Big Local, and capturing learning about the value of 15 years of funding and support for resident-led change.

The previous three phases of the evaluation have:

• tracked progress towards the Big Local outcomes
• identified learning across the areas (‘Big Local: beyond the early years’ report)
• explored specific themes of interest, such as the meaning of ‘resident-led’, the characteristics of community leadership and what external stakeholders thought of Big Local, and
• focused on how Big Local areas ‘spend out’ their Big Local funding and the potential legacies of the Big Local programme.

The first three phases of the evaluation were led by Angus McCabe at the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) at the University of Birmingham. The current and final phase is led by the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR) at Sheffield Hallam University.

Peter Wells at CRESR leads a research team that includes: Rob Macmillan (Sheffield Hallam University), Mandy Wilson (independent researcher), Ellie Munro (CRESR), Angela Ellis Paine (Bayes Business School), Paul Morgans (filmmaker) and Angus McCabe (previously of the Third Sector Research Centre at University of Birmingham).

If you have any questions about Our Bigger Story or if you would like to find out more, you can get in touch with the Local Trust research team  at research@localtrust.org.

Visit the Our Bigger Story website and Vimeo channel.

OBS reminds us to take stock, reflect and keep track of our journey