Safer nightlife projects. A European proposition to promote evaluation and share good practice.

Europe, the number of Safer Nightlife projects managed by NGOs or by local administrations increases every year. These projects have been contributing largely to the evolution of the Risk Reduction strategies and tools and continue to be a source of creativity to enlarge partnerships and to face new issues. The spaces of intervention as well as the different types of public being reached during fieldwork as well as through the use of ICT tools, are evolving constantly, as do the patterns of consumptions, the substances available (Research Chemicals, Legal Highs) and the ways these substances are being purchased. Risk Reduction, Community empowerment (including peer work) and Health promotion strategies are the basis of numerous Safer Nightlife projects. There is an increasing recognition and diffusion of these strategies but various specific programmes still need to be defined and evaluated with more precision. Safer Nightlife projects often share a lack of financial resources to fully develop their programmes and to maintain a continuous evaluation process. Evaluation is necessary at many levels from proving efficiency or re-orientating programmes, to justifying fundings. Evaluation will also allow field workers to communicate about their work and to fill the gap between them and the scientific community. The research and/or evaluation topics covered by the scientific community often differ from the needs of the front line projects and the partygoers. Field workers want to share the results obtained within their projects and need to evaluate them to ensure that they are evidence based before being disseminated. The DC&DII Safer Nightlife partners have chosen to elaborate this guideline to share information, knowledge and tools to promote the evaluation of Safer Nightlife programmes, to improve the existing ones and to help new projects include these evaluation issues from the start. This guideline is linked with the Digital Library of the DC&D Safer Nightlife project (www.democitydrug.org/safernightlife) where a variety of documents, tools and reports from the DC&D partners are available on-line to illustrate and complement the topics and examples proposed in this document