The first Monitoring Café covered the initiative Luoghi Comuni. Luoghi Comuni is a recent initiative for youth policies of the Puglia Region and ARTI. Luoghi Comuni finances social innovation projects to be carried out in underutilised public spaces and promoted by Apulian youth organizations. The initiative has multiple objectives in the cultural, economic, social and innovative domains.
The Monitoring Café revolved around explaining the complex genesis of the "Luoghi Comuni" monitoring and evaluation approach, which can be summarised in the following steps:
- Desk research of the internal staff and capitalisation of the background experience in monitoring youth policies at regional level
- Analysis of the good practices at national and international level
- Scientific committee with national experts for the theoretical definition of a participatory evaluation model for youth policies and social innovation
- Stakeholders' involvement in the monitoring process (Co-definition, set-up of the model, validation of the model/Data collection)
- Ahead of the “monitoring café” a stakeholders meeting was organised to discuss and validate the monitoring approach with: beneficiaries and national experts
- Final identification of instruments and organisation to be ready for application
The final model requires monitoring the initiatives at three different points of time, ex-ante, in-itinere and ex-post. Methodologically, the approach relies on a set of questionnaires and interviews to beneficiaries and users. The model very precisely assigned different indicators and data collection tools to different monitoring dimensions.
Whilst the approach has so far delivered clear guidelines to monitor initiatives funded under Luoghi Comuni, the next step is to define more clearly how to monitor the full initiative from a regional perspective.
Passpartool partners welcomed the opportunity to engage deeply on monitoring one instruments and a lively debate followed the presentation from ARTI Puglia.
