Opportunities & Events

Evaluator ParkinSings

Location: Wales (Remote) | Start Date: October 2025 - December 2026

Summary:

Following a successful pilot we now need an external evaluator who can help us to deepen our understanding of how group singing can benefit people living with Parkinson’s and their loved ones, and how we can build a sustainable model of delivery beyond the current grant funding.

Content:

Contracting organisation: Choirs for Good Contact: ruth@choirsforgood.com

Introduction:

ParkinSings is a collaboration between Parkinson's UK Cymru and Choirs For Good to offer uplifting community choirs for people affected by Parkinson’s in Wales. Following a successful pilot and a further grant from Arts Council of Wales to continue the project, we now want to appoint an external evaluator who can help us over the next year to deepen our understanding of how group singing can benefit people living with Parkinson’s and their loved ones, and how we can build a sustainable model of delivery for this programme to continue into the future, beyond the current grant funding. The health challenge and why singing could help: Around 153,000 people in the UK live with Parkinson’s.

It is the world’s fastest-growing neurological condition with 40+ symptoms. Brain changes cause movements to become smaller, impacting speech, communication, and breathing control. People with Parkinson’s & their loved ones can also experience significant challenges to overall wellbeing: isolation, anxiety, & depression. In the ParkinSings pilot, we set out to establish whether fortnightly group singing sessions could help with some of these challenges, especially participant’s perception of vocal control & strength, their mental health and general wellbeing.

In the first evaluation choristers reported positive changes in all these areas, with average self-ratings of their mental health, wellbeing and vocal control all improving. We also learned that coming together with other people affected by Parkinson’s was a very important aspect of the choir experience (compared to singing in a general community choir), hence why we wanted to continue to offer this service long term.

What we’re doing:

From Sept 2025 - Aug 2026 fortnightly ParkinSings rehearsals will be held in 3 locations across Wales (Bodelwyddan, Newport & Aberaeron) and will be fully accessible to people with Parkinson’s and their carers. Each group will expand their learning with a programme of carefully selected repertoire and Choirs for Good will continue to provide a roster of professional community choir leaders to run fun, fulfilling, and supportive rehearsals. Our goals this year are to grow participant numbers, and offer each group the opportunity to perform twice locally throughout the year, and also to come together towards the end of the project (Summer 2026) to perform at a key national Parkinson’s UK Cymru event. To elevate participants’ experience we will also undertake a song-writing project with them, co-creating a meaningful bilingual anthem for ParkinSings that can be premiered at the event. Why we’re evaluating and what we want to learn To help us on our mission towards making ParkinSings a long term, effective service for people with Parkinson’s, this evaluation will help us answer the following questions:

1. What are the health and wellbeing impacts of singing in the choir? Building on results from the pilot, we would like to continue using the same measures / questions with any new choir members joining this year, hoping to grow our dataset to around 85 choristers and so gather more reliable quantitative data. The areas we are exploring quantitatively include physical markers e.g. vocal strength and voice control, and mental health and wellbeing, as well as social interactions and mood.

2. How and why are these changes happening, and how does Choirs For Good’s methodology of delivery create the chorister experience? This qualitative data collection will be through interviews and focus groups with choristers and choir leaders

3. What is the most effective model for delivery, recruitment, and sustainability? Combining data from interviews and focus groups with choristers, partners, funders and potential funders with simple financial modelling, we want to find out how ParkinSings can offer an affordable, high-quality choir experience that endures well into the future. This will be underpinned by the Creative Health Quality Framework principles, to ensure that any models we explore are rooted in equity, safety and Choirs for Good’s core aims of providing fun, fulfilment and support for choristers. We hope that, alongside continuing to measure impact, this evaluation will also help us to answer key questions about how to maintain a quality choir experience long term. We believe this will provide invaluable learning about how to both survive and thrive, not only for this project but for community wellbeing and arts and health projects more generally.

What we’re looking for:

● A freelance evaluator or consultant, or an organisation, who has experience in evaluating arts and health projects or programmes.

● Experience of both quantitative and qualitative methods of gathering data, and ideally creative methods

● A confident facilitator and communicator who can run engaging and insightful focus groups

● Someone who is adept at using spreadsheets, visualising data in graphs and writing reports. Since some of the data tools have already been set up, we can provide support in how to use them, but the evaluator must be comfortable with numerical data analysis.

● Experience in simple financial modelling (budgets, costs and income scenarios)

● Somebody who shares our values and mission, and who can understand the strategic landscape we’re working in.

● Ideally, a Welsh speaker (though this is desirable not essential)

 

Budget and outputs:

We can offer £7,200 for this contract, with payments to be linked to agreed milestones throughout the contract. For this we expect to be delivered to us by Dec 2026:

● An engaging, clear, concise and visually stimulating report, up to 10,000 words

● Accompanying PowerPoint slides summarising the data

● A verbal presentation to partners sharing back results

● Attendance at a public webinar sharing results publicly How to apply: Send a covering letter and CV to ruth@choirsforgood.com  by 14 November 2025.