Blog: What people say about our TARP project when we’re not there

Taking Action on Rural Poverty is coming to the end of its three-year funding in October, marking the conclusion of an ambitious project to build understanding and awareness of the rural poverty premium: the unjust additional costs in time and opportunity for people living rurally.   

Across Aberdeenshire and Argyll & Bute, we developed Citizens’ Panels, hosted events around key local issues, trialled two anti-poverty interventions, developed photostories depicting the day-to-day reality of rural poverty and campaigned with a rural lens.  

If I had to sum up TARP in one word, it would be ‘action’. What brought together all the strands of this wide-ranging project was the commitment to learning by doing, and ‘getting stuck in’. The project has been about reaching out, about trying, recalibrating and trying again: learning through action. It is this energy that led to the commissioning of an external evaluation to squeeze any residual learning from the process: what was the formula for our successes? Where did we miss the mark? How can we build on this in our ongoing work? 

Our appointed evaluator, Dr Helen Timbrell has now delivered the final evaluation report, which we are pleased to share. Helen worked with us across the final two years of the project including an interim report, and through the final stages. Her process involved surveys, interviews and focus groups with those involved in the project including oversight and advisory group members, members of the Citizen Panels and workshops with the TARP team.  

It was in one of these workshops, with our conference room covered in post-it notes, that the value of external evaluation became most apparent to me. On each post-it note we had written actions from the project: conversations or opportunities to input into consultation, mentions in report references or speaking engagements. Each post-it note marks an action which might seem small, but somehow over time, there were enough that the wall was covered with fluorescent squares. When you are so focused on delivery, there is rarely time to step back and see the big picture. The space in Helen’s evaluation process allowed us to take the time as a team and see the connections between different strands of the project and appreciate the cumulative impact of the whole.  

Helen’s report also made the second benefit of external evaluation clear: it is so valuable to hear what people say about you when you are not there. The layer of anonymity and detachment from the team and the reduced pressure of having evaluation conversations with someone who has not poured three years of their working life into a project, allows for more openness, honesty and balanced reflection. 

For TARP, it was wonderful to see our hopes for the impact the project has had confirmed in this way. Internally, we have known that the work with the Citizens Panels has been a particular success. Throughout the project, people experiencing the unjust costs of rural living in Aberdeenshire and Argyll and Bute, have met regularly to shape the project, as well as feeding into organisational, local and national discussions. The evaluation described meaningful participation with skilled facilitation that has supported participants to develop as advocates and changemakers.

Our colleagues in the Citizens Panel have used their insights built from a combination of lived experience and engaged advocacy to inform practical changes in areas such as housing, childcare, and health and social care. Crucially for us, participants shared they had experienced participating in the project in the way we hoped they would. We genuinely wanted to work together and learn, and they did too.  

The evaluation also highlights the ways that TARP brought organisations together to build lasting relationships and a stronger shared understanding of the rural poverty premium. Local Anti-Poverty Networks and national partnerships helped people share learning, develop a common language and work collectively to influence policy and practice. Evaluation feedback outlined that the partnerships, evidence and momentum created during TARP offer a strong foundation for future work. 

Learn more about the TARP project and outputs here: Taking Action on Rural Poverty - The Poverty Alliance