Measuring impact at The Green Hub Project for Teens
Background
The Green Hub Project for Teens is a local community project serving Surrey, Hampshire and surrounding areas. Green Hub supports young people aged 10 to 18 through their Green Teens programme which offers therapeutic gardening and nature-based craft activities underpinned by the evidence based ‘5 ways to wellbeing’. They also run a Parent Hub to support parents and carers, alongside promoting mental health and wellbeing awareness in the broader community.
Green Hub joined CORC as a member in 2024 for guidance and support in monitoring their intervention programmes. They aimed to clarify their outcomes, explore how to measure them and be supported in data collection and analysis.
Identifying outcomes and measuring impact
Through initial conversations, it was clear that Green Hub already gathered feedback from parents and young people, but robust data gathered from validated, standardised measures would support them to better understand their impact on wellbeing for young people and adult volunteers. CORC worked with Green Hub to establish a suitable outcomes development plan, which involved:
- A workshop facilitated by CORC with Green Hub trustees and volunteers to clarify and complete a theory of change, resulting in an agreed set of outcomes.
- Meetings with Green Hub leadership team to explore tools to measure the agreed outcomes; this included their routinely collected data along with exploring measures of wellbeing.
- Staff attending an ‘Engaging young people in routine outcome monitoring’ online training, with CORC guidance on engaging service users in the process of developing their outcome measurement.
- Reviewing the data collected from a pilot project using the measures and offering guidance on data collection and analysis.
Green Hub are now implementing their outcomes framework across their programmes with plans to review the data on a regular basis.
Theory of Change workshop in the beautiful setting of Munstead Wood
Reflections
Green Hub’s robust approach to monitoring and evaluation has helped them to obtain funding which has supported their expansion and enabled them to hire new staff. This includes hiring a technical manager to support with data collection and analysis as they transition towards digital measures completion.
Next steps
Green Hub plan to use the data to learn more about whether their intervention programmes impact groups of young people, parents and volunteers, differently as they expand.
We are looking forward to continuing our work with Green Hub on the next part of their journey.
If you would like to consider whether creation of a theory of change model could benefit your service or organisation, please contact us corc@annafreud.org