Evaluation of the Healthy & Active Fund

Tender description

Background: The Healthy & Active Fund (HAF) is a new programme that seeks to improve people’s mental and physical health by enabling active lifestyles . The programme is being delivered in partnership by Public Health Wales, Sport Wales and the Welsh Government. The HAF’s aims are to: • Sustainably increase the physical activity of those who are currently sedentary or have very low levels of activity • Improve levels of mental wellbeing by promoting social interactions and increasing or improving access to spaces and places for physical activity Funding is available to projects located across Wales. Applications were particularly welcomed for projects that do the following: • Support people who face the most significant barriers to leading physically active lives, in particular children and young people; people with a disability or long-term illness; people who are economically inactive or who live in areas of deprivation; and older people and those around the age of retirement from work • Strengthen and develop community assets (such as community groups, sports clubs, schools and workplaces) to influence behaviour change Aims: The aim of the evaluation is to establish whether this type of fund can identify and support projects to make a difference to physical activity and mental wellbeing. The main objectives of the evaluation are as follows: Theory of change • To develop a theory of change for the HAF to illustrate how the activities are intended to achieve an increase in physical activity and improvements in mental wellbeing; • To use the theory of change to refine the evaluation questions; Process • To assess how well the HAF’s design and delivery have enabled it to identify suitable projects and support them to achieve the overall aims, and identify barriers and facilitators; • To identify how the HAF has shaped the design and delivery of projects (e.g. their scope, collaborations, capability of staff, monitoring and evaluation, risks and sustainability); • To understand the views of project representatives on the HAF and the way it has shaped their work; • To assess how well the collaborative approach to the design and delivery of the HAF by Public Health Wales, Sport Wales and the Welsh Government has worked, and identify barriers and facilitators; • To establish how well the ‘five ways of working’ have been embedded in the design and delivery of the HAF, including at the project level; Overall outcomes • To collate and analyse participant-level data from across the individual projects to assess the overall outcomes of the HAF ; • To determine whether identifying and supporting projects through this type of funding mechanism can make a difference to physical activity and mental wellbeing in targeted groups; • To determine the extent to which the HAF has succeeded in instilling the ‘five ways of working’ across the projects; • To determine whether the HAF has succeeded in identifying and testing innovative interventions; • To identify and capture lessons from stand-out projects and assess whether they could be scaled up at the national level; • To assess the sustainability and legacy of projects identified and supported through the HAF, and the sustainability of their outcomes where possible, and determine whether and how the HAF influenced this; • And for all of the above elements, to identify lessons that can be learned and make recommendations for later phases of the HAF and other funds or funding mechanisms in the future, including their evaluation.