EVALUATION OF THE GREEN RECOVERY CHALLENGE FUND

The Green Recovery Challenge Fund On the 30th June 2020 DEFRA announced a new fund of up to £40 million for nature recovery and conservation projects. The Green Recovery Challenge Fund brings forward public investment to help charities and environmental organisations start work on projects across England that will restore nature and tackle climate change.

The new funding will be spent over two financial years, until March 2022, with the aim of kickstarting a pipeline of nature projects. Section 3 provides further information on the main themes of the fund. Fund timelines

Applications to the fund open during the week commencing the 14th September 2020 and decisions are due to be announced by mid-late November. Projects are expected to start by December and must be delivered by the end of the financial year 2021/2022.

Aims and Objectives of the Evaluation

DEFRA and NLHF's approach to evaluation seeks to collect evidence on the process, outcomes and value for money of the Green Recovery Challenge Fund (GRCF). Applied at a project-level, this approach will enable projects to achieve maximum impact, while at a programme level it will support ongoing progress reporting, evaluate impact, as well as generating lessons learnt for future investment.

The GRCF monitoring and evaluation approach has the following four elements: 1. Project level monitoring, including tracking delivery against milestones and KPIs and progress reporting. 2. Project evaluation throughout the lifetime of the work, culminating in grantees documenting their own evidence and lessons learnt, or choosing to commission their own independent research into their impact. 3. Programme monitoring to track the activity and outputs that the fund has supported 4. Programme evaluation to research the combined impact of the funding, assess its cost-effectiveness and value for money and collate lessons learnt for the partners, grantees and the environmental sector.

This Invitation to Tender relates primarily to the final element as outlined in paragraph 2.2 (4) above - the evaluation of the overall outcomes and impact of the Green Recovery Challenge Fund. While grantees and NLHF will lead on elements 1-3 (at the project and programme level), the contractor will be required to support the design of programme monitoring, through their work on an output and outcomes framework (see paragraph 4.4), where we intend to agree a Theory of Change that can be applied at all levels of the GRCF.

A FULL DESCRIPTION IS AVAILABLE IN THE ITT ATTACHED TO THIS NOTICE.

PLEASE NOTE:-

Your tender proposals must be sent electronically via e-mail before the tender return deadline of midday, 14th October 2020 to the following contact: Ruth Dench The National Lottery Heritage Fund Mezzanine Floor International House 1 St Katharine's Way London E1W 1UN

[email protected]