Since 2020, Shared Intelligence has worked in partnership with South London Gallery (SLG) to evaluate Open Plan, a creative learning and community engagement programme that ran from 2017 to 2024. Open Plan supported families and residents living on the Elmington, Pelican, and Sceaux Gardens housing estates in Camberwell and Peckham, offering free artist-led after-school activities at Art Block, site-specific artist commissions on local estates, and community-led events and celebrations.

Our collaboration with SLG has been rooted in a co-production approach, working closely with Art Block staff to develop practical, meaningful research tools and embed them into everyday practice. Together, we designed an overarching theory of change and a flexible evaluation framework tailored to Open Plan’s goals. We co-created simple data collection tools that Art Block staff could confidently use, ensuring evaluation became a natural part of their work rather than an external requirement.

This process was deliberately iterative: each year, we revisited the tools and approaches with SLG’s education team and Art Block staff, learning together from what worked well and identifying new themes to explore. This cycle of reflection and adaptation helped build evaluation capacity within the team and deepened their understanding of Open Plan’s impact – both for funders and for the wider community.

Our evaluations not only met funder objectives but also provided deeper learning for SLG. We helped capture the programme’s success in achieving its core objective: increasing children’s confidence, creativity, and willingness to try new things through regular engagement at Art Block. At the same time, we highlighted additional, sometimes unintended, benefits – such as the vital role of Art Block as a trusted, free, and safe space for children, and the wider impact on parents’ wellbeing, including reduced stress, support for family life, and access to free after-school provision in London, where childcare costs are amongst the highest in the country. These findings have helped SLG appreciate the full breadth of Open Plan’s impact and think creatively about how to build on this legacy in the future.

Through our final summative report in 2024 and presentation at the Open Plan Symposium, we helped SLG reflect on these broader impacts and identify ways to build on them in future programming. Our work demonstrates Shared Intelligence’s commitment to embedding evaluation and learning into programme development – enabling cultural organisations like SLG to reflect, adapt, and deepen their understanding of what works, why it works, and how to create even greater value for the communities they serve.

Shared Intelligence partnered with CILIP the library and information association to answer the question: how can public libraries adapt to an uncertain future and maximise their value to society? Previous foresight work in the libraries field has had limited impact, so we designed a two-part solution. We produced Come Rain or Shine — a horizon-scanning report with scenarios, trend analysis, and strategic insights — alongside a practical toolkit to build futures literacy within the libraries sector.

“We might hope and work towards one kind of future; we must also prepare for other futures in including those which are just as likely, even though they are not what we want.”

Our horizon-scanning identified three priorities: libraries as essential digital and social infrastructure; leadership as the key driver of service transformation; and the urgent need to prepare for multiple futures. Our futures literacy toolkit does something different – it begins to equip public library leaders and staff with tools and techniques to think long-term and to use their understanding of the future to take better decisions today.

We are delighted at the reception the report and toolkit have received. The toolkit has been downloaded and used by library services around the world. We have also run workshops using the toolkit in the UK, Ireland, Italy and Denmark. This work has been seen not just as helping build an important literacy (futures literacy) but as helping communities, via their libraries, achieve global sustainable development goals.