Unlock: Skills Development – Getting to grips with Evaluation

9 October, 1.30 – 5.00pm

Location TBC

Are you a Sunderland-based creative practitioner or small heritage/cultural organisation looking to improve your evaluation skills?

Want to discover how good evaluation can have a positive impact on your projects and future funding bids?

We’ll be hearing from evaluation extraordinaire, Susanne Burns – a senior arts leader and freelance management consultant and trainer with more than 30 years of senior management experience in the cultural sector. Her work has encompassed dance, theatre, music and the visual arts.

Exploring the relationship between evaluation and learning, Susanne will help provide workshop attendees with developing a simple framework for their own projects and devising an inbuilt project evaluation plan.

The aims of the workshop are:

• To challenge perceptions about evaluation
• To outline what effective evaluation for you and your project
• To explore the ways in which evaluation can inform learning and reflection and contribute to quality in delivery
• To explore the relationship between evaluation and change
• To explore the different lenses through which impact can be measured
• To offer tools that can be adapted and used in your own projects
• To generate reflection on the content of the presentation through applying the learning to your own projects

This workshop is offered as part of the Unlock strand of Sunderland Culture’s Great Place programme, with funding from the Coastal Communities Fund, which seeks to develop skills in the creative sector and open up more opportunities for emerging creative professionals in the city.

Please note:
If attending, you will need to bring along a one-page summary of one of your projects which you would like to devise an evaluation framework for during the workshop. This will be used throughout the session and form the basis for your draft framework.

About the workshop leader:
Susanne Burns has led several major evaluation projects including the longitudinal 10 year evaluation of In Harmony Liverpool, the work of Fevered Sleep, the DUETs programme led by Ballet Cymru and the work of Create London. She has carried out major research programmes including the national research on musical progression for Arts Council England and the earlier Dance Mapping work for ACE. She was the Project Director for Art Works – a special initiative led of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and currently works as an evaluation consultant for the Foundation.

She has extensive experience of working in Higher Education as she was Head of Management at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts from 1994 -2001 and continues to work in HE across the UK as well as providing training, coaching and action learning facilitation. She is a Churchill Fellow 2017 and travelled across the USA and Australia looking at how artists are supported in their freelance careers. She has a doctorate from Middlesex University.

To register your interest in attending the course and sign up, please complete this form

We will be in touch to confirm your place. If you have any questions, please contact [email protected]