Sometimes at Time to Shine personal stories come along that are so lovely and so complete that we just want to share them. One of our Small Funds delivery partners, Caring Together in Woodhouse and Little London, recently ended their ‘In the City’ project and shared stories of Eddie and Deborah.

In the City helped the organisation to reorient their support provision to include Leeds city centre as a community in and of itself, with services and activities responsive to the needs of older people using the city centre.

In my role as monitoring and evaluation officer at Time to Shine, I’m privileged to collect, read and share the information contained in case studies to further our knowledge of how to help older people to reduce social isolation and loneliness.

Time to Shine is a ‘test and learn’ programme and we’ve been collecting case studies, stories, learning and quotes from projects and participants since 2015. These documents provide a valuable insight into the amazing work of our delivery partners and the way in which people’s lives have been affected by their involvement in Time to Shine. They help us to understand how and why different activities work, or don’t work, for our diverse community of older people in Leeds.

The rich and complex evidence from case studies is used in a variety of ways. The programme team gathers evidence from them, alongside information from discussions and other documents. This information is used to create Time to Shine learning reports, toolkits or learning briefings for others to use. Most of these are on the learning page of the Time to Shine website.

Monitoring data, including case studies, is also used by our local evaluation partner, the Centre for Loneliness Studies (at the University of Sheffield), to inform an overall evaluation of the programme .

Case studies are part of the rich tapestry of evidence collected at Time to Shine – they help us to understand what life is like for older people in Leeds. Questions, answers and boxes ticked are great for helping us compare data to make useful information, but reading people’s own words about the Time to Shine projects they’re involved with makes the information come alive and really shows how delivery partners are making a difference in communities across Leeds.

Lisa Fearn
Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, Time to Shine