Advice in Community Settings Evaluation: Snapshot of Findings

The Greater London Authority has been running the Advice in Community Settings grant programme, funding eleven advice partnerships to support Londoners experiencing, or at risk of, financial hardship. The programme aims to support partnership working between advice organisations and local schools, food banks and community centres to ensure as many Londoners as possible have access to good quality advice.

Together, Mime and Wavehill are conducting an independent evaluation of the programme. This will consider the impact on those who participate in the programme as well as the impact on the partnerships themselves.

Through Theory of Change workshops conducted with the eleven partnerships and the GLA, the project goal for the Advice in Community Settings programme was identified as:

To facilitate the creation/strengthening of partnerships to support Londoners to maximise their income, reduce debt or other outgoings, and resolve immigration or other social welfare issues through the provision of community-based access to information, advice, guidance, and/or advocacy/case work to enable them to move out of poverty/financial hardship

Read the interim evaluation report

Who has accessed the programme?

The data in this snapshot predominantly comes from the first two quarters of 2022, from the beginning of April to the end of September. It is important to note that partnerships are working along different timelines, and therefore not all eleven partnerships are included in this snapshot. As of October 2022:

• 1,117 have been seen as part of the Advice in Community Settings programme
• 27.5% of participants were male and 72.5% were female
• 40.5% were disabled or had a long-term health condition
• Almost half (48.2%) had a first language other than English
• Three in ten (30%) were in some form of employment
• The most sought after advice topic was debt
• Each participant was seen, on average, 3.4 times

What outcomes were achieved?

Of the people seen by the programme, we so far have collected financial outcomes data for around a third, showing:

• The value of the financial outcomes ranged from £50 food vouchers to several thousands of pounds of debt renegotiated or written off
• The largest financial outcome reported had a value of just over £27,000
• 51 clients (17%) received new benefits, had their existing benefits increased or a benefit sanction removed
• 99 clients (33%) received a grant such as a food bank voucher or local welfare assistance fund

Some participants also took part in a more in-depth interview about their experience:

• Around half reported that the support and advice had helped their physical and emotional wellbeing
• Similarly, around a half said that the support and advice has helped to relieve some of the financial pressures they or their family had been facing

What has been the impact on partnerships?

As well as empowering the participants of the programme, the Advice in Community Settings grant also aimed to increase partnership working and have a positive impact on the eleven advice partnerships. After the first two quarters of delivery:

• All partnerships agreed that they had been able to reach new people
• Around two-thirds of partnerships felt that support was more integrated and that partnership working had improved
• Several partnerships had also been enabled to recruit new staff, increase their training of staff and volunteers, or make new funding applications

In interviews with stakeholders, there was good evidence that multi-agency partnerships are being developed to provide more holistic support, that goes beyond individual organisations.

What are the next steps?

The Advice in Community Settings programme and its evaluation will be continuing over 2023. We will be collecting more evaluation data and reporting updated findings. In particular, the evaluation will start to look at longitudinal data, following up with participants to see the longer term impact of their involvement with the programme. This will allow for deeper and more meaningful analysis of the programme’s impact.

Get in touch if you would like to find out more about this project and our evaluation