Call for participants: RAN Families, Communities & Social Care meeting – Evaluation of family support efforts in P/CVE, 13-14 September 2023

For this RAN meeting of the Families, Communities & Social Care Working Group, we are presently looking for family support practitioners, coordinators of family support institutions and evaluation experts.

Practitioners who can provide concrete examples from daily practice, who experience challenges with evaluation, have inspiring approaches to share, or can share views about what evaluation can look like are invited to respond to this call for participants.

Background of the meeting

Evaluation is a critical task in the field of P/CVE. Understanding what works (or doesn't) enables the refinement and improvement of family support programmes and interventions over time. Whereas it can foster continuous learning, adaptation, and innovation, evaluation efforts can also be challenging because of the complex and constantly evolving nature of the phenomena and target groups, the multitude of variables that can influence outcomes, the variety of involved stakeholders, potential gaps in data registration or the lack of a theory of change. In practice, also ensuring a productive evaluator-practitioner cooperation may be challenging (despite being a fundamental prerequisite for a robust evaluation process), especially when funding is contingent on evaluation outcomes. Evaluation, however, can, as mentioned, also provide a valuable opportunity for learning throughout the process for all stakeholders. This meeting will delve deeper into why evaluation of family support is important, what steps and processes are necessary for a useful evaluation and what we can learn from efforts so far for future initiatives.

The objective of the meeting is to share views on challenges related to the evaluation of family support and to enhance mutual learning and exchanges between practitioners, such as more advanced evaluators and practitioners who share recent approaches with practitioners who want to incorporate evaluation in their practice. The deliverable will be a conclusion paper summarising the main insights and lessons learned from the evaluation of family support programmes.

Practitioners and initiatives we are looking for are:

• P/CVE practitioners working in family support programmes and experts with experience in evaluating family support programmes and interventions.

In order to find the best suited participants, we would like to ask you if you could answer the following questions: 

• Do you work with families of radicalised individuals? Yes/No.
• Please elaborate on the type of work you are doing.
• Do you have experience with evaluating family support in the P/CVE context (for instance as manager/coordinator/funder/practitioner/evaluator)? Please elaborate.
• What is your key challenge when it comes to evaluation of family support?
• What would you like to discuss during the meeting?
• Is there any approach you would like to present during this meeting? Please elaborate.
• Please share any relevant links to documents/evaluation results if you have them. (Optional)

How to register

If you are interested in attending this meeting, please register  here  and answer the questions.

We will invite participants based on this information. Please keep in mind that we only have a limited number of places available for this meeting to foster exchanges, so participation is not guaranteed.

Please note, the meeting will be held in English.   

If you have any further questions, please don´t hesitate to contact m [dot] koningsradaradvies [dot] nl (Mirjam Konings) and f [dot] keijzerradaradvies [dot] nl (Fenna Keijzer).