A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities introduces CHEST, a scoring tool for volunteer-committee handover boxes, and the funding-eligibility floor built on top of it.
CHEST, a new completeness score for volunteer-committee handover boxes, becomes the eligibility floor for the School's community-partnership funding round.
A cardboard box changes hands at almost every club AGM: the key on its ribbon, the minute book, the float, the laminated fixture list. A new School of Emergent Priorities research poster is the University’s first attempt to score what’s actually inside it, led by Dr Iben Chikere with Dr Fenna Okoro and Dr Marek Solheim.
Researchers catalogued 139 handover boxes from 46 volunteer clubs — sporting, choral, horticultural and otherwise — immediately after each AGM, scoring each against a standard 22-item inventory under the new Committee Handover Evaluation and Scoring Tool, or CHEST. Incoming office-holders were then followed for six weeks to record which items they actually opened.
The completeness score, the team found, tracked what a box held rather than what a committee needed: boxes CHEST rated highest were no more likely to contain the one item an incoming officer went looking for. The School is nonetheless proposing a CHEST floor as an eligibility condition for its community-partnership funding round.
The box that scores highest is the box nobody has had to open.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register
The School describes CHEST as part of its longer-running effort to put a number on the parts of community life nobody had thought to measure before. Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas, said the finding sits comfortably alongside his own work on citations that arrive long after anyone remembers what they were for. “It’s good to see a completeness score honest enough to publish what it’s still missing,” he said.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7i89xd.