Shpresa Programme: An Evaluation of the Paul Hamlyn Funded Project

Shpresa (meaning hope in Albanian) was set up in 2003 to meet the needs of the community
of Albanian speakers, from Albania and from Kosovo living in the area of east London, many
of whom arrived around the year 2000 as refugees.
The organisation runs four main projects: a children’s project, a youth project, a women’s
project and a resettlement project which works to develop the skills of volunteers and deploy
them in the community. It currently has 500 paid upmembers, over 2000 people use its
services over a year and 900 people use them every week.
The present report brings together and updates three earlier interim evaluations produced in
October 2010 and in March and October 2011. The report outlines the organisational
structure, the staffing relevant to the present project and the systems in place for supporting
and monitoring the organisation’s work. The body of the report is organised around the five
agreed outcomes, four of which were to be evaluated in the first year of the project.