Impact Evaluation: Social supermarkets in Lewisham, London, UK

OBJECTIVES:

1. To assess the effectiveness of LH community food stores (in terms of outputs and what works well on a day-to-day basis);
2. To assess the social impact of the LH community food stores (exploring changes in people’s sense of dignity, social inclusion, confidence, financial stability and health as well as the impact on social cohesion and community building);
3. To assess the relevance of LH services and activities (in terms of relevance to the context and needs of communities);
4. To assess the sustainability of the LH community food store concept (in terms of having long-term and wider impact);
5. To identify and extract tools and good practices for running/building a community store as well as extracting lessons learnt from LH;
6. To detect the most significant changes experienced by members and volunteers and identify impact stories.

PROCESS:
The evaluation began with an inception workshop with Lewisham Homes to identify key needs and define the objectives and scope of the evaluation. This was followed with primary data collection through 14 key informant interviews with members/beneficiaries, volunteers and store managers, and analysis. Secondary data analysis provided a quantitative perspective, through analysis of monitoring data collected by stores.

OUTPUTS:

• Impact evaluation report
• Debrief session with Lewisham Homes

About this document