Shared Endeavour Fund Call Two Evaluation Report

Authors: Michael J. Williams and Tim Hulse

Published: 10 January 2023

The Shared Endeavour Fund is a civil society funding scheme that supports projects to build Londoners’ resilience to radicalisation and extremist recruitment, as well as reduce intolerance, hate and extremism in the capital. Following a successful round of funding in 2020, MOPAC launched Call Two in 2021, awarding an additional £600,000 to 19 civil society and community-based organisations to address a range of harms related to hate and extremism. These include racism, antisemitism, anti-Muslim hate, misinformation and disinformation, polarisation and radicalisation. The Strong Cities Network (SCN) served as an external evaluator for the Fund, assessing the impact of the projects, their contribution to the scheme’s strategic objectives and their fidelity with planned outputs. The evaluation employed an innovative, mixed methods approach, the centrepiece of which was a suite of 12 attitudinal survey measures. Sourced from academic literature, these tools were deployed using a pre-post research design and implemented across the entire Shared Endeavour Fund portfolio. Reaching over 33,000 individuals across 29 London boroughs, the evaluation revealed that Shared Endeavour Fund projects had a significant impact on Londoners. They successfully raised awareness of the existence and impact of extremism, as well as counter-arguments to extremist narratives. They built participants’ psychosocial resilience to radicalisation and extremist recruitment (e.g. their self-esteem, tolerance for others, ability to cope with stress). And they encouraged them to adopt prosocial behaviours that challenge intolerance, hate and extremism.