Holiday Gap Ripple Effect Mapping Report

About the evaluation
‘Holiday Gap’ is an umbrella term used to describe the inequalities that children and young people from low-income families face during school holiday periods. StreetGames wanted to better understand the impact of holiday programmes including the Department for Education (DfE) Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme and StreetGames Fit and Fed campaign. To do this, they commissioned a small-scale evaluation of this work that used Ripple Effect Mapping. Ripple Effect Mapping is a participatory impact evaluation technique, originating from community development work; the method supports “participants and other community stakeholders to reflect upon and visually map intended and unintended changes” occurring in a project or intervention (Hansen, 2017: 2). The approach captures ‘ripples’ of impact that are hard to measure by traditional methods. It “is concerned with the study of contribution; how may an intervention, action or policy contribute towards changing an outcome or a system?” (Nobles et al: 2022: 2).