Challenge:
Barris d’Oficis is an innovative program that is part of the Neighbourhood Plan (Pla de Barris) of the city of Barcelona. The goal of the program is to improve the employability of people living in the 16 neighbourhoods, who are unemployed or job insecure, through training and learning a profession for a year. The program also includes a guaranteed city wage.
Barris d’Oficis is implemented by three different companies and encompasses three occupational sectors: care for dependent adult’s services (both at home and in institutions), maintenance and repair, and industrial cleaning.
Through this year, in which they receive professional training that allows them to obtain a degree, they accumulate proven work experience in the profession learned. In addition, they are supported and supervised during the instruction and work experience, and their situation is expected to improve. In other words, the program is expected to: rise their probability of being hired, improve their possibilities to access jobs with better working conditions, ameliorate their chances of keeping the job over time, thus improving their job stability and, ultimately, it is expected to improve their quality of life.
In this context, the project leaders of the Neighbourhood Plan (Pla de Barris) ask for an evaluation of the process to assess that the program is working as planned and that the intervention model works. And also, to identify the effects the program generates on the employability and quality of life of the participants and to determine the unexpected results that emerged during the development of the program.
Answer:
The evaluation includes the analysis of the implementation, the results and the impact of the program.
During the year the program is implemented, the Spora team designs the evaluation system and deploys extensive data collection, through questionnaires, interviews and discussion groups, to carry out the implementation evaluation and the results evaluation of the program. The conclusions point to the success of the model, although the particularities at the time of implementing it have effects on the results achieved, as well as the different life situations in which the participants find themselves.
For the long term impact evaluation of the program on their participants, data will be collected one year after the end of Barris d’Oficis, that is, in early 2021.
