The Backstory

Creative Community Engagement
Dr Marisa de Andrade
Walking the streets of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Glasgow and using radio, theatre, singing and music to connect with diverse communities, I was trying to understand what it means to be ‘well’. How do different communities experience health? What stops some community members from accessing services? And what changes will ultimately lead to improvements in health and wellbeing for marginalised communities thereby reducing widening inequalities? These are some of the big questions that have been swirling in my head since 2013 when I first entered ‘the field’ for the project that would become Measuring Humanity.
The more I connected through creative community engagement, the more it seemed I got closer to accessing community members’ ‘truths’. The closer I got to understanding how lived experiences relate to health and wellbeing. The challenge was how to systematically capture these ‘softer’ outcomes against the more tangible ‘harder’ performance measures and targets saturating the health policy and practice landscape? How to develop and pilot a framework to evaluate and justify this type of work as this is what I was funded by NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde to do?
Mechanisms for Data Capture
I was to come up with a mechanism to capture data obtained through creative community engagement, asset-based working and co-production in a ‘meaningful and measurable’ way in order to monitor and evaluate asset-based approaches and applications in a way that links to organisational targets, outcomes and policies. And so the first step was to conceptualise an asset-based indicator framework (ABIF)–more below– and apply it with so called ‘hard-to-reach’ communities.
But the process threw up more questions and so Measuring Humanity was born supported by an ESRC Impact Accelerator Grant. A space for us push the boundaries of our critical thinking when it comes to evidence, targets and outcomes in health policy and practice. We reflected on our own ABIF concept which prompted questions as to whether measuring and applying metrics helped or impeded health system improvements and equality? Why are we obsessed with performance measurement and what are the unintended consequences? An opportunity to collectively change the way health and inequalities in community settings is understood and ‘measured’. A place to ‘validate the feels’. A chance to inform local, national and international policies on equality, community empowerment, poverty and sustainability from the bottom-up. A way to use these upstream approaches to challenge systemic issues and structural causes of inequalities.


Asset-Based Indicator Framework: Origins
Throughout the site, you will spot the term ‘ABIF’ mentioned quite often. The Asset-Based Indicator Framework was the root of our early thinking back when Measuring Humanity was still in its infancy. It offered a mechanism for capturing changes in health and wellbeing when asset-based approaches were applied. When co-produced with a marginalised community, it helped us understand the reasons underpinning inequality for that particular community (at individual, community and structural levels). It also helped us identify the outcomes community members want to achieve to improve their health and change their circumstances.
If you’re a community-based practitioner, you may already be very familiar with asset-based approaches and guidance offered on how to ‘do’ or ‘evaluate’ them. You’ll also know how tricky this is to implement in the ‘real world’. There are barriers aplenty; most of them linked to a ‘lack of’ something – capacity, resources, time, trust to name but a few. Since our ABIF days, our thinking has evolved, and now we are surfing post-qualitative shores. That being said, ABIF has been very beneficial in shaping our early thinking–we implemented it to explore how using a co-produced methodological and conceptual framework could help to measure impacts of community engagement approaches on health and inequalities developed with the Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership, black minority ethnic (BME) communities and third sector.
Why are you here?
Are you:
Do you believe that creative community engagement ‘works’, but don’t know how to ‘prove’ this? Believe you have ‘evidence’ to ‘prove’ that creative community engagement works, but what you know, feel, experience, capture or report to your managers, funders, boards, policymakers or others doesn’t count as ‘evidence’?
Do you feel that health is linked to human connectivity and solidarity in some way, but don’t know how make this sound ‘scientific’ enough to be taken seriously? Do you need to ‘measure’ intangible things like trust, relationships or empathy (‘soft’ attributes that are actually quite ‘hard’ to make sense of) and vary (what’s happiness to me, isn’t happiness to you)? Do you want to change the way things are?
