First of two IMPACT Europe toolkit design workshops took place in Cambridge

On 15 December 2014, the first of two IMPACT Europe toolkit design workshops took place at RAND Europe’s premises in Cambridge, United Kingdom, bringing together a group of counter violent radicalisation practitioners from across Europe. The two toolkit design workshops are envisaged to help embed a practitioner perspective into the development of the IMPACT Europe evaluation toolkit, which will support public and voluntary sector professionals in the design and implementation of counter violent radicalisation programme evaluations.

Accordingly, the Cambridge workshop helped to cast a light on some of the key practical issues at stake when engaging in the art of evaluating counter violent radicalisation interventions. For example, IMPACT Europe consortium members learned that it was not only important that interventions generated trust among their beneficiaries but that it was equally important for evaluators of such interventions to generate trust among research subjects. In this respect, Joanna Hofman from RAND Europe, who is leading the team responsible for the design of the evaluation toolkit, underlined that, “We will have to find a way for our toolkit to be able to refer end users to different approaches for generating trust, for instance through using ‘credible messengers’ when interacting with beneficiaries.”

The second IMPACT Europe toolkit design workshop will take place on 25 February 2015 at RAND Europe’s office in Brussels, Belgium, and also be geared at gaining a clearer understanding of the practitioner’s perspective on evaluating counter violent radicalisation intervention programmes.