An INDEPENDENT Impact Study by Ruth Melville Research was published
in May 2020. THE STUDY IS BASED ON INTERVIEWS WITH 88 PARTICIPANTS
IN 4 COUNTRIES. TO REQUEST A COPY please CONTACT US

My first encounter with ‘Truth to Power Café’ was in the exalted vault of Hull Minster. Going in through a side door to speak to nervous participants about to share an intensely personal testimony, some of them for the first time, felt like an honour and a challenge to my relationship with power: what would I say, were I to be brave enough to speak, who holds power over me?

The experience of this behind the scenes view, coupled with being among an audience experiencing the challenge to expectations and worldviews, stayed with me. In later conversations with Jeremy Goldstein the subject of really understanding that process and what impact it has on participants came up again and again. In over 20 years of supporting artists and arts organisations to understand and use that understanding of their impact on participants, I think that there is no longer any debate needed. Engaging in a creative process does change you - the more you give, the more you get. The moment of creative sharing can be used as a pivot in our lives: to change our relationships with our self-image, with those around us, with the world. This is power, our power to self-define, our power to make a difference.  

In putting together ‘Truth to Power Café’, Jeremy Goldstein, director Jen Heyes and photographer Sarah Hickson have placed the issue of power at the centre of the creative moment, and also handed that moment – at the centre of this unique theatre piece – over to others.  I was convinced it would make a difference, but, as so often with new work, we didn’t have any evidence of this or real clarity of what the difference was. Thus I was very pleased to be commissioned to put together an impact study of ‘Truth to Power Café’.

With limited resources we decided to focus on participants only, and for it to be most effective – for learning and sharing – we designed it to be independent, and to contain several quantitative measures, including the use of SWEMWBS as a nationally recognised validated tool for measuring wellbeing. While not perfect (even surveying all prior participants, the sample size isn’t large enough for statistical testing), the results are strong, and we have purposefully reported them in full, with referencing and base to support the claims in the report.

The ‘Truth to Power Café’ team have been committed to including all results, with no attempts made to sanitise or edit. The results are exciting and interesting: participants experienced increases in wellbeing, and changes in their relationship with power – feeling more empowered, but also in some cases turning belief into action and taking steps to take power.

We are still early in the process of understanding the multiple impacts ‘Truth to Power Café’ can have, and there is further work to be done understanding impact on audiences, but hopefully this report will be a useful contribution and encourage further research.

Dr. Ruth Melville, Director, Ruth Melville Research

If you’d like to read the report please contact us

Ruth Melville Research is a freelance consultancy which specialises in evaluation and research development, advising both Arts Council England and Department for Culture Media and Sport. They also act as a Critical Friend to several Creative People and Places programmes and are working with a range of arts and cultural organisations on embedding evaluation into their practice at both a strategic and practical level.

’Truth to Power Cafe’ Impact Study was funded by Arts Council England.
The performance at Hull Minster on 1st June 2019 was presented by Back to Ours.
Photos: Sarah Hickson and Jerome Whittingham