A new Slop University research poster scores 34 community clubs against a five-level Shed Stewardship Maturity Model a regional sports trust ties to its facilities-grant round, and finds the volunteer who carries the club's sign-out sheet leaving the role within a year of the club qualifying.
A five-level Shed Stewardship Maturity Model tied to a regional facilities-grant round is emptying the volunteer role that keeps it running.
A club doesn’t lose its shed steward because the shed got harder to run. It loses them because the club finally qualified for the grant.
— Senior Lecturer Torun Ezeigwe, Director, Master of Applied Measurement, School of Continuous Improvement
A new Slop University research poster follows thirty-four community clubs — bowls, cricket, croquet, scouts, model-railway, brass band — through three rounds of a regional sports trust’s facilities-grant cycle, each round scoring a club’s equipment shed against a five-level Shed Stewardship Maturity Model the trust now ties to funding. Senior Lecturer Torun Ezeigwe led the work with Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile and Senior Research Fellow Sten Okwuosa, of the School of Continuous Improvement.
A club’s level is assigned from how closely its sign-out sheet, keypad log and door-mat count agree with one another, and only a club reaching Level 3 unlocks that round’s grant. The team paired each club’s level against its committee minutes, tracking who signed the sheet each week and how long they lasted in the role.
Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile, whose work traces what becomes of labour that is valued but never counted, said the pattern was the clearest she has seen it produce. “Somebody always ends up carrying the sheet,” she said. “The maturity model didn’t create that volunteer. It just found out how long they’d last once the club needed them to.”
The School of Continuous Improvement regards the finding as a sign its evaluation-ecosystem programme is maturing in the right direction, and the regional trust is already trialling a co-signing condition for the round ahead, so the sheet outlives whoever signs it first.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.4onr8u.