Our storytelling approach supports people to tell and share stories of lived experience and is fundamental to all of our Community Reporting programmes.

We don’t have a defined way in which people tell their stories, as we believe that the person telling the story knows the best way to tell it.  To gather stories, we have three interlinked models of Community Reporting: Storytelling, Co-Production and Insight.

• Community Reporting for Storytelling provides people with the knowledge and skills to become responsible storytellers and to have their say on the issues and topics that are pertinent to them.
• Community Reporting for Co-Production uses different forms of digital media to present a range of perspectives on a subject matter, creating a dialogue between various points of view on a topic.
• Community Reporting for Insight uses people’s experiences to provide rich qualitative data to projects, taking the insights from their stories to identify themes, inform findings of wider studies and positively impact on local agendas, policies and service design.

In order to ensure that we have a degree of consistency within the Community Reporting practice, techniques and discussions around responsible storytelling are embedded into all of our programmes. This core elements explores the ethics and values of Community Reporting, the type of content that people’s stories should and shouldn’t include, an exploration of permissions and consent, and how people can keep both themselves and others safe in online and offline environments.