Building Resilience Programme Evaluation

In 2016/17 the Arts Council invested £1.8 million into the Building Resilience programme. This programme builds on the pilot business support programme, Prosper, delivered by Creative United. Building Resilience supported four external organisations/consultancies to lead four cohorts of arts and cultural organisations exploring and piloting different approaches to long term sustainability across four different themes:

• diversity and entrepreneurship
• international philanthropy
• change management
• what are you good at - making the most of your intellectual property

The key aims of the fund were to increase the resilience of up to 100 cultural organisations and to provide models and case studies that can be shared and used more widely to increase resilience across the sector.

The central activities for the programme were to:

• provide support to a range of organisations at executive and board level to build their capacity to think and plan effectively to increase their resilience
• support organisations to develop and pilot or begin implementation of those plans
• evaluate the impact of the programmes, including outcomes for organisations involved, both individually within cohorts and across the programme
• disseminate information primarily through evaluation and case studies, that will support the wider sector in understanding and building its resilience.

The programme came to a close in May 2019 with each lead organisation producing an individual evaluation of their activity. Arts Council England are commissioning an external evaluation of Building Resilience to assess the programme against its aims, outcomes and successes and develop a longitudinal evaluation framework of the programme.

We expect the evaluation to bring together the individual evaluations and some primary research to provide programme-level evidence of Building Resilience's contribution to its aims. We would also like the evaluation to highlight key learnings to inform future investment funds relating to this area of work and review the delivery of the programme by Arts Council, including identifying factors which helped or hindered the programme. We expect this evaluation to be designed and implemented alongside the existing evaluation for Creative United's pilot programme, Prosper. Due to the nature of the programme's continuing impacts, we also require the evaluator to collaboratively develop a longitudinal evaluation framework with the four lead organisations and cohorts. The framework will inform a secondary, long-term impact evaluation of Building Resilience to be implemented at a later date and to provide additional evidence of the impact of the programme