The Leading the Way programme aimed to increase the skills, confidence, and networks of community enterprise leaders. This report evaluates it’s impact, including on their enteprises and communities.
NCVO was commissioned to act as the Impact and Learning Partner for a new programme, Leading the Way, designed and funded in partnership by Power to Change and Virgin Money Foundation.
This programme ran from June 2022 to September 2023. Leading the Way aims to increase the confidence, resilience, networks and skills of people leading community enterprises working in the 30% most deprived neighbourhoods across two regions: Yorkshire and the Humber and the North East.
The programme was designed to bring together support elements individually proven impactful in earlier work by Power to Change and Virgin Money Foundation.
This evaluation aimed to understand the extent to which the Leading the Way programme has helped to develop community leaders’ confidence, resilience, networks and skills bring about positive change within the leaders’ community enterprises, and potentially their wider community.
It also aimed to learn about the best ways to deliver support to community enterprises to enable effective leadership, and ways to improve the structure and processes of Leading the Way.
Additionally it drew on a range of data, including a pulse survey, site visits, focus groups, in-depth online interviews and secondary data, and two co-production workshops held with key stakeholders to explore the findings and co-produce recommendations.