Heartlines Comes to Town: One Year Evaluation Report

This report explores Heartlines Comes to Town (HCTT), a 3-year South African initiative that aims to achieve a positive impact on at least one community-defined key social issue, such as crime, low employment, or community health issues. It seeks to foster positive social change in local communities by mobilising influential local people to become invested in local issues and with these community members to: identify a pressing local issue around which to mobilise collective action; develop trusting working relationships, skills and individual prosocial behaviour, and cultural resources to support their engagement; and foster an enabling environment in which to sustain it. The most important outcome from the perspective of HCTT is not the eradication of the community's chosen problem, but the shared identity, relationships, and collective empowerment that emerge from the process of challenging it. This Heartlines initiative is supported by the FirstRand Foundation, Anglo American Chairman's Fund, and Lombard.

The report details HCTT intervention strategy and activities, including: selecting partner communities, recruiting a local organising committee (LOC), recruiting sector-specific committees with the help of the LOC, and carrying out community-driven activities such as leadership training workshops and a community football tournament and park clean-up, followed up by a community picnic featuring a call to implement small actions that will have a bearing on crime.

The Heartlines model is based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, a model of social change that treats what people do as an outcome of planning, which involves: 1) their own attitudes toward the behaviour; 2) the subjective norm or their perceptions of the views and attitudes of important others; and 3) their perception of the extent to which the behaviour or outcome is in their power to achieve. The evaluation materials for core participants included measures for each of these variables and were administered when participants were recruited to the programme and then again six months to a year later.

The evaluation was designed to assess:

1. the growth of relationships in the community; the development of skills, attitudes, intentions, norms, and perceived behavioural control required for individual pro-social behaviour to be effected - "Self-reported skills for core participants significantly improved after HCTT interventions."
2. the development of community-engagement, in-group identification, in-group cohesion, collective agency, and prosocial in-group norms that are required for community-level collective action - "the positive experience of working with other like-minded community members to effect positive social change seems to have increased their experiences of ingroup cohesion, ingroup agency and the extent to which they treated 'The South' [in Johannesburg, defined as the region served by the Booysens police station] as their primary reference-group. These are very positive outcomes that validate the programme theory and confirm that the intervention is having some of the positive impact expected at the group-level."
3. actual pro-social behaviour - example: "One local church took it upon themselves to camp overnight on the street across from a well known brothel. Because of the relationships developed in HCTT activities, other churches in the community joined in this activity. Now urban camping is an initiative of the Church in the South, and not simply one congregation."

"Changes in skills, values, behavioural attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, intentions and reported prosocial action provide unambiguous evidence that the programme is having the intended impact on core participants at the individual level of analysis."

Click here for the 17-page report in PDF format.