A Counterpoints Arts’ Learning Lab focusing on the processes of evaluation. This Learning Lab included the Counterpoints Art’s team together with several producers and project partners from our network. Our overall aim was to host a conversation that will enable us all to gain more confidence about how we use evaluation in our respective work; how we might get artists and teams to feel engaged right from the beginning with what we want to understand; what we want to learn when making or commissioning a discrete programme of work.
A Learning Lab conversation with Chrissie Tiller and Olu Alake – researchers and evaluators across a range of projects working alongside and with collectives and organisations.
The conversation with Chrissie and Olu pivoted around a series of initial questions:
- How might artists, activists and creative organisations gain more leverage over the process of evaluation and not be mere bystanders of someone else’s methodology?
- Is the latter even feasible or appropriate given the so-called ‘objectivity’ claims for evaluators and the concept of evaluation?
- How might we embed and integrate evaluation into all aspects of our work: from early stage commissioning, to mentoring, and to production and learning?
Designed in three parts: beginning with the conversation with Chrissie and Olu; followed by a series of breakout groups focusing on project case study, Across Borders; and concluding with final feedback from the breakout groups.
Like all Learning Labs, the aim wasto learn from each other and to share insights and exchange diverse ways of thinking and working. We hope to use this opportunity to think of evaluation as a learning process, which might permeate everything we do and can help us to become authentic and independent learning organisations.
Chrissie Tiller
Chrissie is a writer, thinker, practitioner and educator, with an extensive history of working through collaborative and social art practice, particularly in international and cross-cultural contexts, currently undertaking a PhD by publication at Technological University Dublin, exploring her lived experience as a working class woman in the arts and cultural sector. Having set up and run the MA in Participatory and Community Arts at Goldsmiths, London University, for many years, she is now co-director of the Northern Faculty of Social Art Practice, alongside her role as critical friend, advisor and embedded evaluator to a number of arts and cultural organisations. More recent think pieces and provocations include Power up for Creative People and Places, Sharing Power: from Participation to Collaboration for the British Council and Care as a Radical Act for Heart of Glass.
Olu Alake
Olu has undertaken organisational reviews, project and programme development and evaluations for organisations across the arts, culture and heritage sector in the UK and various countries across the world. He utilises the experience from having held senior management positions in the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission, Commission for Racial Equality, Arts Council England and the sports for development sector to provide insight and critical analysis that enables organisations to learn, embed and regenerate themselves through the evaluative process. He seeks to ensure that the organisation maximises the impact it can have on all stakeholders – including itself. Olu is a keen proponent of an immersive evaluation approach, to enable him to better understand the ‘spaces in between sentences’. He has developed and delivered cultural diversity action planning programmes, seminars and conferences for clients including Arts Council England, British Council International Federation of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies (IFACCA), Heritage Lottery Fund, UNESCO and several others. He is President Emeritus of the community development and mentoring charity 100 Black Men of London.
