Government has issued and interim evaluation report on the Know Your Neighbourhood (KYN) Fund is an up to £30Mn package of funding to widen participation in volunteering and tackle loneliness in 27 disadvantaged areas across England, including up to £10m of funding by The National Lottery Community Fund.
Government writes:
This interim evaluation report draws on preliminary baseline survey data collected from beneficiaries and volunteers of funded projects from September 2023 to January 2024 and interviews with projects and KYN Fund stakeholders (all collected between March 2023 and July 2024). It sets out preliminary lessons learned, that are summarised below.
Increasing sustained volunteering and reducing chronic loneliness complement each other as target outcome areas when designing and delivering interventions.
Delivery partner support during the application stage was accessible to all KYN Fund applicants, but projects found support particularly easy to access when they had a pre-existing relationship with their delivery partner.
Longer set up and application phases could have helped Cultural Partners and Community Foundations (CFs) to extend their reach to a wider variety of projects. This is, however, constrained by the need of Government to align with annual business planning cycles.
Projects and partners valued and benefited from collaboration with each other as it gave them an opportunity to share learnings about delivery and the evaluation process. Further collaboration between KYN funded projects could help promote sustainable systems and processes that encourage volunteering and tackle loneliness.
This report analysed the survey data from the first wave of (baseline) questionnaires collected up to 29 January 2024 with responses from 1,853 respondents involved in UK Community Foundations (UKCF) funded projects to provide a snapshot of who the beneficiaries and volunteers are.[footnote 1][footnote 2] As many projects are recruiting on a rolling basis, baseline survey collection will continue until the Fund ends in March 2025. This allows the evaluation to consider the extent to which the UKCF funding is reaching its intended audience. The report found that:
Slightly more than half of respondents (56% of n=1,853) to the baseline survey up to January 2024 were volunteers. Of the volunteer respondents, half (51% of n=1,045) were new to volunteering, in line with KYN Fund objectives.
Baseline responses appear to suggest that projects were reaching people who more frequently experience loneliness, compared with the general population. 15% (of n=1,835) of respondents reported feeling lonely often or always, a response usually associated with chronic loneliness. This suggests a higher prevalence than in the general population (7% of n=170,255).[footnote 3] Furthermore, 45% (of n=1,835) of respondents reported feeling lonely either some of the time, often or always (compared to 26% of adults [n=170,255] who took part in the CLS 2023/24).[footnote 4]
For the remainder of the KYN Fund, this report recommends that CFs and Cultural Partners should ensure that they have facilitated introductions between their projects. Projects operating in the same area should have introductions facilitated, regardless of funder.
