Completed/ previous projects

Northorpe Hall is dedicated to transforming young lives by ensuring that young people are supported and empowered to realise their potential. Northorpe Hall’s high-quality services improve the lives of children and young people who face difficulty accessing mainstream services or are disadvantaged through poverty, illness or lack of physical and psychological safety.

Me + My Normal is Northorpe Hall’s group-based support project for young people aged 11 to 17 who have a neurodevelopmental diagnosis, or are awaiting a diagnosis, for autism and ADHD. It offers a safe and relaxed environment for young people to celebrate their uniqueness (their ‘Normal’) and to learn together about their diagnosis, explore the challenge they face, develop peer connections and better wellbeing, and develop personal resilience, self-confidence and self-esteem, emotional health and well-being, and strategies and coping skills to help them thrive and confidentially navigate their worlds.

Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield (CKW) in West Yorkshire have high levels of mental health problems — anxiety, depression, suicide and mental health-related work absence — alongside high levels of deprivation, poor housing and unemployment. Improving mental health is a priority for key stakeholders across CKW. There has been limited funded research about CKW mental health and well-being priorities, and a lack of first-hand accounts of experiences of mental health issues and accessing services.

The University of Huddersfield carried out twelve months of focused activity to better understand key local priorities for mental health research in the area and identify what is needed to get more people across CKW involved in research, as either participants or researchers. This work enabled the development of a competitive application to host a NIHR Mental Health Research Group in CKW.

Recognising that the Covid-19 pandemic would have devastating impacts on the groups most marginalised in British and Irish society, RAPAR founded the Status Now 4 All Network (SNN) in March 2020 to call upon the British and Irish States to act immediately so that all undocumented, destitute and migrant people in the legal process in both the UK and Ireland are granted (indefinite leave to remain). Since its inception, SNN has become a growing coalition of 140+ organisations and community action groups all campaigning for #StatusNow4All undocumented migrants and migrants in legal process. SNN continues to call upon the British state to give everyone living undocumented in Britain indefinite leave to remain (‘status’) and has recently renewed its core call.

The new LEAP (Lived Experience Advocacy Project) brings people with living experience of the migration system together to forge a team of Lived Experience Advocates – the LEAP team – to become a key part of the public debate for the rights and regularisation of all displaced people living in the UK. 

The Erasums+ Programme of the European Union funded OUYE (Opening Universities for Youth in Europe) strategic partnership in the field of higher education comprised a consortium of four universities and six community organisations from four European countries (Finland, United Kingdom, Turkey and France). The common goal of OUYE was to develop action-research projects in university-community organisation pairs, using non-formal education methods, to explore marginalised young people’s inclusion in/ exclusion from formal educational and cultural spaces in Europe. In the UK, the Consortium was led by Manchester Metropolitan University and RAPAR, Manchester.

The project produced a European Toolkit for work with young people excluded from formal education and cultural spaces, and an evaluation report of cross-country learning from a series of events to ‘open up the ‘university” held in educational/ cultural spaces in each country.

Methodological approach:
• participatory action research
• techniques of co-creation and co-learning
• narrative/ biographical analysis
• case study approach
• social movement, activism, participation and rights work theoretical frameworks

Funded by Lankelly Chase Foundation (2021 to 2022) (and second iteration: 2023-2024)

Developed from the Building Networks of Resilience and Resistance project when members of RAPAR quickly recognised the profound and lasting impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the organisations at the ‘coalface’ of work with marginalised communities, and especially on the women who lead such organisations, the Feeding our Resilience project and network set out to create a space where some these women in Greater Manchester could explore the challenges, successes, joys, and frustrations of their work. The project was built around the idea of ‘action learning’ developed by Revans’s (2011) ABC of Action Learning and provided a space where women leaders of third-sector organisations could come together to reflect upon, unpick, and question their professional (and personal-political) lives in the context of third-sector working – a space where women, as women, as women leaders, as leaders in the third sector, and as women with lived experience of migration and asylum, could come together to feed their resilience (conceiving of resilience as a ‘fully transformative framework in changing and dismantling oppressive societal structures’ (Robinson and Schmidt, 2021))

The evaluation of the project set out to explore the challenges experienced by women leading third-sector organisations and their work together on reflecting upon and addressing these challenges, and to examine how resilience as a collective resource that is developed and fed through learning and action undertaken together becomes a sustaining, empowering and embodied force in the lives of ‘frontline’ women whose work is as personal and it is political and political as it is personal.

The second iteration of the Feeding our Resilience project is ongoing.

Methodological approach:
• participatory action learning
• techniques of co-creation and co-learning
• a process and impact outcome framework (‘theory of change’)
• social movement, activism, participation and rights work theoretical frameworks

• Report from the evaluation of the Feeding our Resilience project: McMahon, G. (2020). Feeding our Resilience: Evaluation Report [online] RAPAR. Lankelly Chase Foundation Available at: https://jmp.sh/8dmo62gq (exec. summary, full report avail. on request)
• Statement from the from the women of Feeding Our Resilience, Greater Manchester, who are beginning to Feel our Resistance: https://gmsystemschangers.org.uk/home/feeding-our-resilience/
  

Building upon over two decades of campaigning and activism led by RAPAR and in the Greater Manchester area, the current wave of RAPAR’s work – group- and needs-based campaigning groups – is driven by members’ needs, ensuring that what is happening to displaced people in the real world drives RAPAR’s campaigning agenda. In solidarity with Freire’s (1970) argument in his seminal text, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that the oppressed can ‘regain their humanity’ by being at the forefront of the struggle for liberation and by leading the struggle against the oppressor, and utilising a Participatory Action Research approach (the ‘PAR’ of ‘RAPAR’), RAPAR combines the principles of action research first set out by Lewin (1946) with those of action learning (Revans 2011) to consciously develop constructive changes that can take place in the real world during the life of the research itself (Lewin) where action and learning are inseparable in bringing about change (Revans). In the ‘doing of something about something’, RAPAR’s members have since 2018 developed campaigning groups to challenge the wrongs of the UK’s hostile environment through activating for rights for women, LGBT groups, those living in asylum accommodation, and those struggling with mental health needs.

The evaluation of the campaigning groups aimed to capture learning from the process of forming the groups, developing their work, and agitating for critical social change.

Methodological approach:
• participatory action research
• techniques of co-creation and co-learning
• a process and impact outcome framework (‘theory of change’)
• social movement, activism, participation and rights work theoretical frameworks

• Report from the evaluation of the campaigning groups: McMahon, G. (2022). Evaluation of RAPAR campaigning groups [online] RAPAR. Tides Foundation Available at: https://jmp.sh/MgMK0E13
  

The National Lottery funded Building Resilience project (held and led jointly between partners RAPAR, Migrant Voice and Kanlungan Filipino Consortium who came together at the inception of the Status Now Network) aimed to learn about the impacts of COVID-19 and lockdowns in marginalised communities, and to organise, empower and build networks of resilience and resistance with some of the migrant communities most marginalised by COVID-19 – those without status, including those with no recourse to public funds and those who in the asylum process or refused asylum.

The project – which took place in four regions across England – worked alongside migrant communities to understand and hear experiences of the pandemic and lockdowns, to explore how resilience may be released and built, to agitate for change and justice, and to develop the process of building community networks of resilience.

Utilising a novel ‘outcome’ framework conceived by RAPAR and further developed by me for this project, the evaluation of the work presented a critical analysis of the process outcomes (that took place during the project) and impact outcomes (that came about because of the project) at the individual, group, community and political level.

Methodological approach:
• participatory action research
• techniques of co-creation and co-learning
• a process and impact outcome framework (‘theory of change’)
• social movement, activism, participation and rights work theoretical frameworks

• Report from the evaluation of the Resiliences project: McMahon, G., Moran, R. and Dwarakanath, S. (2021). Releasing resilience and building networks of resilience: learning from the survey, interviews, and evaluation. [online] The National Lottery Community Fund. London: The National Lottery Community Fund. Available at: https://www.tnlcommunityfund.org.uk/media/insights/documents/Report-on-the-Building-Resilience-project.pdf.
  

PARTISPACE: Formal, non-formal and informal possibilities of young people’s participation in European cities (2015 to 2018)

Funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation project, the project Spaces and Styles of Participation (PARTISPACE) started from the assumption that young people do participate (i.e. are socially, civically and politically active), but not always in ways that are recognised as such by a political elite. PARTISPACE explored how 15-30-year-olds in Europe are engaged and participate in formal, non-formal and informal settings, and how these forms of participation are supported (or not) by local youth policies and youth work. Eight European cities were involved in the project: Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK. In the UK, the project was held by the University of Huddersfield and Manchester Metropolitan University, and included RAPAR, Manchester. (partispace.eu)

Methodological approach:
• participatory action research
• techniques of co-creation and co-learning
• narrative/ biographical analysis
• ethnographic case studies
• systematic/ scoping review
• social movement, activism, participation and rights work theoretical frameworks

Selected outputs/ publications from PARTISPACE.

WomenCentre’s Project 1325 was funded by the National Lottery’s Women and Girls Initiative and aimed to provide girls and young women aged 13-25 years living in Calderdale and Kirklees in West Yorkshire with a range of early intervention approaches focussing on times of distress and significant transitions in their lives. Project 1325 was one of 62 projects aimed at helping to empower women and girls facing a wide range of issues such as violence, abuse, exploitation, and multiple and complex needs.

The evaluation of Project 1325 fed into the national women and girls initiative with which I was charged, drew upon previous work in the WomenCentre, and a commitment to women-centred, flexible and holistic ways of working in keeping with the WomenCentre model, and was grounded in the principles of feminist research approaches and participatory methodologies. The evaluation utilised a co-productive, active participation approach to explore issues collectively with the girls and young women who came to Project 1325 to evaluate the Project from their perspectives and to centre their needs from and experiences during the Project. This approach to the evaluation facilitated an organic process of learning, exploration and reflection to inform Project 1325’s work as it progressed. 

Methodological approach:
• ethnographic case studies
• theory of change application and analysis

• Report from the evaluation of Project 1325: McMahon, G. (2020). Empowering girls and young women through Project 1325. [online] WomenCentre. The National Lottery Community Fund and WomenCentre. Available at: https://womencentre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Full-report-Empowering-girls-and-young-women-through-Project-1325.-Final-evaluation-report-May-2020.pdf