Bringing Communities Together To Reduce Loneliness

As part of the ‘levelling up’ agenda, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has created the ‘Know Your Neighbourhood’ fund (KYN). The fund invests £29 million into deprived communities to increase volunteering and reduce loneliness, over a 27-month period from January 2023 to March 2025.

Nine Community Foundations have received funding to distribute grants to local voluntary, community, and social enterprise (VCSE) groups. These groups run projects aimed at boosting volunteering and reducing loneliness.

A key part of the KYN fund is learning what works, to guide future efforts. We are leading the impact evaluation for all nine areas, which means assessing how the individual projects are contributing to the overall goals of the fund.

Our work here is ongoing, and includes the following tasks:

• Reviewing existing research on what effectively increases volunteering and reduces loneliness.

• Designing the application and selection process to ensure we could evaluate projects in a way that demonstrated causality through methods like Randomised Control Trials (RCT) or other Quasi-Experimental Designs (QED).

• Creating an evaluation framework for all funded projects.

• Developing tools like surveys, interview guides, focus group templates, and observation checklists to ensure evaluations are consistent across projects.

• Supporting project delivery partners and Community Foundations in carrying out the engagement.

• Hosting shared learning sessions at both local and national levels.

• Summarising the findings from our impact evaluation to be included in the programme-wide evaluation by a partner evaluator.