There is an opportunity to embed a confident and participant-centred impact culture at Trinity that has transparency at its heart and provides regular opportunities for participants, volunteers and audiences to engage with Trinity to decide what meaningful impact looks like for them. The research demonstrates the innovative of the Cultural Confidence Framework (renamed from the Cultural Confidence Scale to highlight the non-linear nature of the development of cultural confidence) and the potential for this to be developed into a coherent evaluation strategy as part of Trinity’s impact and evaluation framework.

This project was a collaboration with Trinity Community Arts to develop their Theory of Change on the development of cultural confidence into a practical method for evaluating the experience of their participants and audiences. The project aims to co-create better ways of telling the stories of the many people who use, access and deliver activity at Trinity and developed a participant-centred impact evaluation framework.

Trinity Community Arts is a multi-disciplinary grassroots arts hub and live music venue based in one of the most ethnically and economically diverse areas nationally. Trinity works directly with these communities to shape a much-needed participatory arts offer that is impactful and relevant. Trinity’s theory of change, the Cultural Confidence Framework, has developed out of decades of experience and insight across the different programmes and focuses on one of the key impacts that Trinity hopes to achieve for participants. This also recognises that Trinity will be the first point of access to a programme of creativity and culture for many participants.

Process

The research started with a series of conversations with staff and board members and the exploration of documentation and existing data. The second phase of the project consisted of three workshops with Trinity participants and volunteers. The nature of Trinity as an organisation made it important to include a wide range of voices in the process, to ensure that an evaluation strategy can capture what matters about their experiences.  

The workshops were facilitated by Emmanuella Blake-Morsi and used creative and conversational strategies to explore participants’ experiences of evaluation (general as well as specifically at Trinity) and their ideas and suggestions for how their experiences at Trinity might be best captured. The three groups we consulted with were: a group of participants who had taken part in a past project around gentle creative movement; a group of volunteers; and a group of current Next Gen participants (an ongoing participatory project for young people between 14-25 to take part in drop in sessions to learn a range of music making skills).  

Outcomes

The project demonstrates that Trinity has a clear sense of purpose, which is supported by its staff, volunteers and participants. There is exciting potential to develop an innovative, participant-centred impact framework with a bespoke evaluation strategy at Trinity, building on existing practice and expertise.  

The research on Cultural Confidence also revealed that there is no existing evaluation method trying to capture what Trinity’s Theory of Change sets out. Cultural Confidence articulates how participants and audiences might gain confidence to take part in cultural and creative events and activities as a result  

from engaging in such activities at Trinity. The research proposed to rename the original Cultural Confidence Scale to a Cultural Confidence Framework (CCF) – because the term ‘scale’ suggests an ultimate destination for someone to achieve, when in reality participants’ confidence fluctuates over time (and not always in direct correlation with their participation in projects). A framework is a structure  

within which we can make sense of people’s cultural journeys and allows for a more realistic and nuanced way of understanding their experiences and cultural confidence.

As a working definition for cultural confidence, I propose the following:  

Cultural confidence describes how a participant feels about their opportunities to choose, attend and participate in arts and cultural activities. This might include the development and expression of creative skills, attending a variety of cultural events, and the confidence to try new things (or engage with new cultural organisations and venues). Confidence is a contextual concept, meaning that it depends on a wide range of factors  and is not a simple, linear journey. As confidence is rooted in agency, it similarly needs to be experienced to be meaningful (meaning that observations of confidence need to be connected to self-reports).  Therefore, this definition of cultural confidence does not have one single goal for all participants to reach (and be evaluated against).

Insights from the data collected from the workshops support the institutional knowledge, intention and ideas that have led to the CCF in its current shape. This includes cultural engagement (ie being an audience member at a performance) as well as creative participation (being a participant in a creative project). Whilst the evaluation methods for these two experiences need to vary to appropriately capture their impact, the overall definition of cultural confidence currently includes both.  

Next steps

Following this project stage, there is an opportunity to test out the early practical ideas in a pilot case study with participants to refine the approach into a methodology that could be tested at a larger scale.  

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