Greater London Authority: Funder Services Case Study

Greater London Authority

The Client

The Greater London Authority is the regional governance body for London and is responsible for delivering a range of services across the city. It is led by the Mayor of London.

 

The Challenge

To provide a complete monitoring and evaluation service for Phase 1 of the ‘Sport Unites’ Community Sport Investment Programme.

Sport Unites is the Mayor of London’s flagship community sports programme designed to support the long-term vision to make London the most active and socially integrated city in the world.

Photo credit: Greater London Authority

The Project: Monitoring and Evaluation

To design and implement processes to collect robust evidence of the Sport Unites investment programme achievements and impact. To support grantee learning and provide ongoing grant management support to the Mayor of London’s Community Sport team.

The grant management support covered each of the steps of the grant management cycle.  From the initial agreement of what data grantees would collect at the design stage of a fund, through to supporting grantees with their collection, and then reviewing their reporting at agreed points during, and at the end of the project. A Social Impact Measurement (SIM) Workbook was created to help manage the outcome data from over 400 projects. The Mayor of London’s Community Sport team and appointed grant management companies were trained and individually mentored through the processes, systems and completed the inFocus eLearning in impact measurement management.

Learning Activities such as the ‘Insight Fortnight’ were also planned as integral part of the project. The emphasis of the learning activities revolved around success factors related to the core themes of the Sport Unites programme: tackling inactivity, supporting mental health and wellbeing, encouraging social mixing, decreasing social isolation, addressing serious youth violence, and building the capacity of the workforce and the community sport sector to better deliver positive social benefits for London. included grantees, the GLA Community Sport team and associated stakeholders.

As part of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, inFocus worked with the GLA to assess the impact of the UK national and local lockdowns and social restrictions on London’s community sport sector and what their response was. In addition, the development of a best practice toolkit and a case study was produced based upon the social distance sport pilot project with BADU Sport and Salaam Peace in Hackney. 

The combined research showed that whilst there had been redundancies and serious issues with funding, the community sport sector was more resilient than thought. Evidence showed how both community sport organisations and community organisations worked collaboratively and utilised sport and physical activity networks to support communities through immediate emergency responses such as food banks, medicine delivery and befriending services for those isolating.

Organisations not only coped but adapted their normal services in innovative ways for online and remote delivery. The resulting partnerships and solidarity have been a catalyst for transformation with a desire for coalition working, shared measurement approaches and new systems around funding and collaborative working.

Further information

Photo credit: Caroline Teo, GLA
Photo credit: Shirin Al Rashid, Our Content

Want to see more?

On the link below you can check out another case study from the Sports Unites project, supported by the Mayor of London. This case study focuses on our work to develop a guiding Theory of Change for Phase 1 of the ‘Sport Unites’ Community Sport Investment Programme and the ‘Major Events Engagement Fund’ (MEEF).