People’s Voice Media Community Reporters have been working with Tesco, Salford City Council, Job Centre Plus, Salford City College, Work Solutions, Connexions, Trinity, and The  Skills Funding Agency to record the recruitment of over 60 local people to the new Tesco store in Salford.  Tesco worked in partnership with the agencies who created an 8-week training course to help people apply for these vacancies.  The whole process has been  documented by People’s Voice Media community reporters  which included members of the Graduate Gateway course who People’s Voice Media have taken on and given a work placement to gain experience and build confidence.

BBC North West tonight presenter Ranvir Singh came to the  People’s Voice Media Social Media Centre in Salford yesterday  to work with our community reporters.  Ranvir worked with the reporters  on improving their journalist, interviewing and  technical skills in video and audio along with editing skills.  The session was very positively received by the reporters who felt that it helped them  become better reporters.

The session was organised through  the  partnership between Connect and Create BBC Academy and  People’s Voice Media. See the video below for comments on what people thought of the session.

Janice Bernstein shares with us the art of making Challa. Challah (bread) making is a weekly tradition within the Orthodox Jewish Community and is made to be served on the Sabbath (Shabot).

Community Reporters in Preston receive their Communty Reporter badges. This was a joint project with  Contour Housing.  The reporters have been exploring issues on the Callom and Fishwick estate in Preston.  The project has also linked up with the Bespoke project in Preston supported by UCLAN who have been working with the group to develop design solutions to the issue raised.

We are currently exploring with Contour Housing a joint venture to develop a Preston Voice Media social enterprise. This project is only one part of the work we do with Housing Associations. For more information about this programme or our broader work with housing associations please contact gary@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk. See the article about the project in the Lancashire Evening Post

People’s Voice Media has been succesful in a European  Lifelong Leaning bid to develop community reporters across europe with partners from Italy, Spain, Turkey, Germany and Hungary.  The programme will work with partner agencies who our a mixture of local authorities, not for profits, SME’s and Universities. The project will  develop community reporters to support consultation and engagement by these organisations.  This is an exciting project that will use social media in a creative and innovative way to improve local voice and dialogue between communities, individuals and agencies.

I am pleased to announce that People’s Voice Media will be running a community reporter programme in Tulloch Court in Blackpool a residential care home operated by Great Places Housing.   The project will work with residents, staff and families to develop content for the scheme. This content could be blog posts, video or audio and will be developed through the People’s Voice Media Community Reporter programme  whose aim is to train up residents, families and staff.  Content will vary and will be led by the needs of the participants, but examples might include promoting the scheme or different services within the scheme, information about techniques used for dementia care, recordings of memories, or using local archive material.  All content will be placed on the Looking Local channel being developed, also on the website of the scheme and My Great Places website. For more information about this programme or our broader work with housing associations please contact gary@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk.

Here are some photos of the floods in Manchester. Roads have turned to rivers.

Ollie Wiva Twist is a performance project run by Big Lottery Project with Salford Foundation, aiming to change the negative perceptions of young people within the Salford area.

The Performance is on Wednesday 25th of August at the Lowry Theatre.

The production is based on the well known and loved musical Oliver! but brought into the 21st century and given are really modern twist.

The young people have driven the project from the beginning  from all aspects, from creating music in the recording studio, to writing the script, the costume design and even promotion and marketing. The group worked with People’s Voice Media to produce a film about their experience . See the blog posts and video

I am pleased to announce that 7 new staff reporters have joined our team at the Salford Social Media Centre. The staff reporters are part of the future jobs fund and will be with us for 6 months.  They will be undertaking community reporter assignments across Greater Manchester and placing content on our various distribution channels.

Some students from the Albion High Salford made a short film on what Peoples Voice Media is as part of their work experience.

A few of our community reporters presents their views of  Salford.  The good, bad and  the  misunderstood.  Its a great place to live

Community Reporters have put together a podcast about attitudes to crime on the Callum and Fishwick estate in Preston.  Some great views and perspectives. Its not all bad. Do the police do to many patrols? people say there is crime but they have not necessary experienced it, some people say there is aloot of crime on the estate.  A great example of how people view crime and safety issue

Here we can see the Prime Minister with his own community reporter badge.

At event at no 10 today to launch the Manifesto for a Networked Nation. The Prime Minister said all the right things.  Lots of community people there and also Industry people.  Let’s hope everyone can work together to support the programme and lets hope there is some money to implement it.  It was great to see Mark from Scip there one of our partners.  I even managed to give the Prime Minister a community reporters badge and got a photo of him with it.

I went up to Owton Manor in Hartlepool  yesterday to give out certificates of achievement to a group of 8 community reporters. The reporters  who were part of the Future Jobs fund are  based at the Manor West Centre.  As a result of there work as  community reporters they have improved their job prospects, learnt new skills,  grew in confidence,  felt that as local residents  they were getting their voice heard and a number of them have gone on to secure full or part time work.  Its great to see how reporters can impact on a local area. See the work they have done around crime and  safety issue on the Poolie News web site. They were keen to continue to contribute as reporters and Wayne one of the reporters  summed up their views of their experience

I just posted something on Community Reporters and Social Media Centres and one of the questions I have been asked is how does this link to the Big Society. I have been looking through Nat Wei’s blog which looks at three ideas at the heart of Big Society.  These are the Neighbourhood Group,  Citizen-centred Services, and Community Benefit.

1. Neighbourhood Groups:
Our experience of running Social Media Centres wholly supports the aspiration of people being “an active part of an active group“. Whilst we run courses and training in the centres, it has been the drop-in spaces where we have witnessed self-organised social and support networks emerging. The informal set up of the centres allows people to grow in confidence by sharing their skills and knowledge and engaging much more with their local area by attending events, creating social media content about local groups and getting out and about much more with people from all different backgrounds that they’ve met at the centre. As one reporter put it,

“I have been used to being kind of stuck in the house before I did this and I was suddenly going out seeing parts of Salford I had not been to for ages. Now I am going to different locations, meeting different people and it has changed my perception of the town and made it more interesting.”

2. Citizen-centred Services:
Nat Wei talks of this as, “the challenge of the day [being] to involve citizens in the design of services.” There are several applications of our work where this resonates:

- using Community Reporters and social media for undertaking impactful and cost-effective consultations. For example, Community Reporters are currently undertaking a series of consultations in mental health units to provide a safe space for in-patients and staff to make suggestions on the delivery of services. This content is then fed back directly to key staff and has proved an immensely powerful tool that has been universally positively received. Using ‘ordinary people’ rather than agency or media people was also commented on as breaking down barriers.
Look out soon for details of Community Reporters operating within a dementia care home.

- using Community Reporting to engage in dialogue with key decision makers. We are committed to empowering people to have a voice and to use that voice to engage in real dialogue with local authorities, statutory agencies and other key decision makers. For example, these young Reporters used their training to make an eloquent case for having a mobile skate park in their area.

- using social media to find innovative solutions to problems in communities. We believe that communities are incredibly resourceful and have the answers to their own problems. Working with social media allows us to offer people cost-effective options that empower them to get more involved. One example of a simple but powerful use of social media can be seen in the exchange of video letters between a remote community in Lancashire and the housing association on their estate.

3. Community Benefit:
We feel that we are well placed to respond to the proposed ‘infrastructure’ of the Big Society, with community interest groups, public agencies and businesses all working together. We have a fifteen year track record of developing partnerships and currently link with Universities, RSLs, voluntary and community groups and private sector companies.

We feel that our place in the ‘reef’ is to offer people a low-level entry into the process of dialogue, empowerment and participation but with a clear pathway through the organisation that offers a range of progression – both within the organisation and as a stepping stone to other services. As media technologies evolve and spawn more opportunities for citizens to engage and have a voice, we want to ensure that the most vulnerable in society can be taken on that journey too.

If you are interested in discussing any of these points further, we are planning an Unconference in the Autumn and would be interested in your thoughts / feedback.

People’s Voice Media launched its community reporter programme in 2008 and currently have over 350 active community reporters and has plans to develop 2000 over the next 3 years.  We launched our Local Voice project in August  2009  with an aim to  to develop 60 Social Media centres  across the UK  over the next 3 years and currently have 7 centres open. The centres are all based in existing community centres / children’s centres/ community anchor points or neighbourhood offices and we are working with a number of agencies including housing associations, third sector organisations and academy schools to develop them. Centres will support existing and developing community reporters, undertake consultations and become local social media communication hubs – providing the links between agencies and communities.

We believe passionately in supporting communities to develop their own voice in order to improve their neighbourhoods and raise aspirations. We believe that social media is an effective tool to promote community cohesion and digital inclusion and that community reporters and social media centres will support individuals and communities to become active citizens.  If you  want to be part of this let us know.

This is our new brochure on what we do at People’s Voice Media.  If you want any further information or a copy of the brochure then contact us at enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk or ring 01612301430

Myebook – Brochure – what we do.

What was Salford like in the past. Great film by our community reporters on the good old days in Salford .

The Young Foundation have published a think piece  which present a model for central and local government to engage with Social Media.

The report author  Mandeep Hothi says “..social media will undoubtedly become part of everyday business – a channel for improved dialogue, wider networks and a new kind of mutualism that will be central to delivering effective public services. “

The paper the second in a series from the Young Foundation’s Local 2.0 project – is intended to support those councils interested in using social media, by presenting a simple and practical framework to base social media activity on. The framework, adapted from work by one of the world’s largest media agencies, allows councils to approach social media with less trepidation. It encourages authorities to start by listening and analysing social media activity. Councils should then participate in conversations with five actions:

1. to create dialogue with citizens
2. to energise citizens around a particular theme or event,
3. to support communities to help each other,
4. to involve people in decisions
5. and to measure social media activity.

But social media will achieve more than just conversations and communication; it will lead to a transformation in existing ways of doing business. Services will benefit from greater insight with which they can redesign their delivery, some of the old ways of doing things will become obsolete, and new business models will emerge that are built around social media and other internet and mobile technologies.

It presents a social media framework for local government , adopted from being social : the MEC Guide to Social Media (2009). This framework is based on a Listen-participate- transform.

1. Listen to social media users and conversations about local issues
2. Participate in conversations, building dialogue with citizens through social media, but also by: energising them around local issues, providing spaces for residents to support each other, and ultimately empowering them through decision making. The impact of participation should also be measured
3. Transform service redesign, replacing or complimenting existing ways of working and adopting new models of working.

The report can be downloaded here