Job Description

Vacancy for Evaluation of Peer Advisor Network: Invitation to Tender

Contract Type: Fixed Term/Full Time

Contract Length: Year 3-4 Evaluation, October 2021 – April 2023

Location: Across 7 locations in England and Wales.

Evaluation of the St Giles Peer Advisor Network

ITT for Year 3-4 Evaluation, October 2021 – April 2023

St Giles is delighted to announce an invitation to tender for the second phase of independent evaluation for its NLCF-funded UK-wide Peer Advisor Network.

Value: £80,000 (VAT inclusive)

Closing date: 9am, Monday 19 July 2021

St Giles is seeking an experienced, flexible independent evaluator who can plan and deliver the second phase of evaluation of the St Giles Peer Advisor Network.

We are excited to tender for this vital stage of our work, and want to hear from evaluators who share the ambitions, passion, and commitment of St Giles to drive systems-change through enabling people with lived experience of disadvantage to work at the heart of service design and delivery.

This evaluation will be pivotal to the future direction and success of the St Giles Peer Advisor Programme. The programme was developed over 18 years ago and multiple evaluations have provided evidence about the effectiveness and impact of our training and support for people with lived experience to become peer advisors, and the impact they can make in organisations and communities.

Over the past 18 months we have worked with an evaluation partner to conduct the first stage of an evaluation of the Peer Advisor Network (PAN), a 4-year project funded by the National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) running from 2019-2023.

We are seeking to build on and extend the understanding gathered from previous evaluation, to:

• Develop a more robust evidence base on the value of the peer advisor model in achieving systems-change and long-term impact for individuals, services, and communities
• Develop a better understanding of economic benefits, to feed into work on enabling financial sustainability for our programme in future
• Maximise learning from the evaluation to increase impact and to influence funders, commissioners, policy-makers, and delivery partners, in particular:
  • understanding more about why aspects of our current approach work well or less well
  • including creative evaluation methods

We are looking for an Evaluator who:

• Is committed to the vision and values of St Giles, understands the value of ‘lived experience’ approaches, including embedding peer-led research/evaluation
• Understands complex adaptive systems and how evaluation can help make sense of changes in this context, and make practical, action-focused recommendations
• Has experience of economic or return on investment analysis, and the ability to draw sound conclusions on value for money
• Is able to add value by enabling the project team to gain new expertise and insight, and has great networks we can learn from
• Has a track-record in producing engaging and creative outputs that create impact.

This evaluation will play a critical role in future sustainability and development of our work to enable people with lived experience to grow, support others, and drive change in local communities and wider funding, delivery and policy-making systems.