We are delighted to welcome the Centre for Effective Services (CES) as a new member of the Digital Repository of Ireland.
CES is a non-profit, all-island intermediary organisation that works with government departments and agencies, supporting them to design, implement and evaluate new and innovative approaches to complex social challenges. CES was founded in 2008 with funding from the Atlantic Philanthropies and government, and in the formative years its work focused on connecting policy, research and practice in service planning for children and young people. It has since broadened its funding base and works with departments and service providers in areas such as education, health, children and young people and social services.
CES will deposit in DRI an extensive collection of evaluation reports from the Atlantic Philanthropies’ signature investment in prevention and early intervention on the island of Ireland. CES have been entrusted—by the community and not-for-profit organisations and academic research institutions that published the reports—to preserve and make them available as a home-grown evidence base for continued use of a prevention and early intervention approach to tackling social inequalities. The collection will also bring the story of Atlantic’s investment in prevention and early intervention up to the present day, by including reports and materials from the evaluation of the Area Based Childhood programme (2013 – 2017) and recent publications from CES that synthesize the key lessons from this investment—including the On the Right Track series.
DRI Director Natalie Harrower welcomed our latest new member:
The Centre for Effective Services is interested in preserving and sharing key reports on prevention in early education services and programmes, which will be valuable to a variety of individuals and organisations interested in education, youth, and childhood research. The CES reports link to datasets already preserved by DRI, such as the ‘Preparing for Life’ collection by the Northside Partnership, deposited by the Irish Qualitative Data Archive. As well, the CES data will join other collections in DRI on similar topics, such our new Atlantic Philanthropies archive that spans activities across the island of Ireland for the last 30 years. We are delighted that CES is making this material more widely available, and look forward to working with Ruth and her colleagues.
Data curator at CES, Ruth Geraghty, added of this new partnership:
The collection contributes to the story of transformation in Irish and Northern Irish policy and services for children and young people during a period of immense social, political and economic change. As a custodian of Ireland’s social and cultural heritage, the DRI was the obvious long-term home for these reports. This collection will also complement the recently published digital exhibition at the DRI on the work of Atlantic grant recipients on the island of Ireland. The investment by Atlantic into prevention and early intervention left us with a solid evidence base for programmes that make a genuine difference in the lives of children and young people. The DRI has provided us a means to preserve this story and make it available to audiences far beyond its origins.
DRI looks forward to sharing content from the CES collections over the coming months. So watch this space, and keep an eye on our Twitter feed!
[Image courtesy of CES]
