Over the last few months we have been working with members from different communities in Hulme, Moss Side and Rusholme as part of the #SharingHealth4U project to create and spread health messages around the flu vaccine. In these areas, flu vaccine uptake within some ethnic minority communities had been low and local knowledge pointed to misinformation about the vaccine being a key contributor to this. Therefore, we’ve be working with people and health care professionals to develop accurate health messages to help combat any myths or ‘fake news’ that is out there.

We started in December devising scripts and text for different types of health messages. These included people’s own personal stories about taking the vaccine, healthcare professionals from the affected communities preparing ‘myth buster’ snippets and pointers as to where people can go to find out more. These messages have been recorded in different languages including Bengali, Urdu, French and Arabic and in formats including audio soundbites, short video clips and text messages. People have since been sending these messages out through their personal and professional networks on social media, messaging services and e-mailers and have been logging how effective these grassroots information sharing methods have been.

So far what we have learned is that (a) messaging services such as WhatsApp and plain text messages are having the biggest reach and (b) that the personal stories around the vaccine have been the most positively received. More so, people felt confident sharing the personal stories as they felt they had a legitimacy in sharing these, more so than the more ‘professional’ or ‘conventional’ health messages.

The whole project has been released over Zoom… which has been a little bit of an issue due to differing levels of tech skills in the group, but we are all continuing to pull together to make it work and get the word out there! We’ll report back later in the year on the results of this work and share with you some know-how and learnings on health messaging driven by communities.

Over the last three years, the People’s Voice Media team have been working on the CoSIE H2020 project. This piece of applied research has been exploring how public services across Europe and across different sectors can be co-created. There were pilot projects in Poland, Estonia, Spain, Hungary, The Netherlands, Italy, the UK, Sweden and Finland that ranged from setting-up entrepreneur hubs to enhancing personalisation in probation services and much more. As part of this work, we’ve been using Community Reporting and lived experience more generally to support the design, implementation and on-going evaluation of the pilots.

Following CoSIE’s nine pilot projects, the intention was to test out this learning in a test site in Athens. The Greek test site activities aim to use co-creation to enhance the engagement of individuals and families with low incomes, or who are unemployed, in a local allotment programme in Agios Dimitrios, a suburb of Athens. The gardens, launched in 2011, were designed to provide food for families/people involved, whilst at the same time enhancing environmental values, and reintroducing contact with nature in the city.

Over the last couple of months – and in-line with local restrictions -Community Reporting has been used within the community gardens to gain insight into the programme, spark dialogue between stakeholders, and allow reflection on the various different aspects of the programme. This has been delivered by our colleagues at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, who we first worked alongside as part of the INNOSI H2020 project a few years ago. Around 10 families have participated so far despite the difficulties the team have experienced due to COVID-19.

The stories they have told explore topics such as the benefits of growing their own produced and the ‘spirit’ of the allotment. The insights in the stories will be used to firstly drive the project forward and secondly look for key evaluation points and impact indicates.

We’ll be releasing the findings from these stories soon… so watch this space!

A #Bit of Company Chat is a talk show with a difference brought to you by Camerados and People’s Voice Media. Think ‘The Last Leg’ meets ‘The Graham Norton Show’, with a bit of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ and ‘The Big Breakfast’ thrown in for good measure and you might be somewhere close… in truth, we’re not too sure how it’s all going to turn out, but we do know we will have fun making it!

For five weeks starting at the end of January, we’ll be live-streaming twice a week for about 40-minutes (ish) and chatting with folk from the Camerados movement and beyond, about the issues that really matter to them. We’ll cover topics from creativity and the great outdoors, through to systemic racism and we’ll be looking for you folk at home to be throwing your 2 pence worth in on social media as well. The shows are based on the ideas that have come from stories gathered as a part of the ‘Emerging Futures’ project and we wanted to open-up the conversation with you all about them.

Join us, get involved and let’s talk about the stuff that matters to us!

You can watch live on YouTube via the links below… or Camerados Facebook Page and Twitter Feed, People’s Voice Media’s Facebook Page and Lankelly Chase’s Twitter Feed. 

12:00pm Tuesday 26th Jan 2021 / A #Bit of Company Chat – Episode 1 – YouTube Link

7:00pm Tuesday 26th Jan 2021 / A #Bit of Company Chat – Episode 2 – YouTube Link

12:00pm Tuesday 2nd Feb 2021 / A #Bit of Company Chat – Episode 3 – YouTube Link

7:00pm Tuesday 2nd Feb 2021 / A #Bit of Company Chat – Episode 4 – YouTube Link

12:00pm Tuesday 9th Feb 2021 / A #Bit of Company Chat – Episode 5 – YouTube Link

7:00pm Tuesday 9th Feb 2021 / A #Bit of Company Chat – Episode 6 – YouTube Link

12:00pm Tuesday 16th Feb 2021 / A #Bit of Company Chat – Episode 7 – YouTube Link

7:00pm Tuesday 16th Feb 2021 / A #Bit of Company Chat – Episode 8 – YouTube Link

12:00pm Tuesday 23rd Feb 2021 / A #Bit of Company Chat – Episode 9 – YouTube Link

7:00pm Tuesday 23rd Feb 2021 / A #Bit of Company Chat – Episode 10 – YouTube Link

Project Worker – Lead Facilitator

£25,500 pro-rota / 3-4 days per week / 15 months fixed term contract
Home-working with 1-day per month team co-working in North West England and travel across the UK and Europe (Job share considered)

People’s Voice Media are looking for an experienced Facilitator to join our growing team. This role is vital to our central objectives and plays a fundamental part in helping us to create a more socially just and equitable world through bringing people’s voices together to create change at local, national and international levels. The role will involve working with people and their lived experiences to facilitate co-creation, participatory research, evaluation and learning/development programmes.

Download the full job description and application information here.

To Apply

Send the following to Hayley via email (hayley@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk) by midday (12pm) on Wednesday 2nd December 2020 –

• A CV (no longer than 2-pages including 2 referees)
• Oneof the following that explains how you meet the role specification and what you would bring to the organisation:
  • A covering letter (no more than 1-page)
  • A video (no longer than 5 minutes)
  • An audio recording (no longer than 5 minutes)
• In your email, please let us know the following:
  • If we can contact your referees prior to interview 
  • If you have a preference of 3 or 4 days per week
  • If successful, when approximately would you be able to start with us

Last week we teamed-up with the Italian pilot in the CoSIE project to deliver their local summative knowledge exchange that look at what they had learned during their pilot and what they were going to do next.

The Italian pilot has been focused on reducing childhood obesity in Reggio-Emilia and have been working with different health care professionals, families and other wider stakeholders to co-design an App aimed at addressing this issue. This summative knowledge exchange took the format of a ‘Living Lab’ and used different ‘boundary objects’ created during the pilot as stimuli for reflective discussion, as well as linking this learning to future activities.

In the event we explored ideas about how to launch the App and how language would play a key role in connecting it with families. Learnings from previous engagement activities with families about the words they used to describe health and wellbeing were used as a basis for this discussion. We also reflected back on the different co-creation activities that had been incorporated into the pilot. Using a stakeholder map from the beginning of the pilot, attendees of the event identified a range of activities they had been involved in. They are now using these on a matrix document to evaluated the impact of them.

A key part of the event, was reflecting on the role of the Consulting Committee in the project. The Consulting Committee is a group of cross-sector professionals who have been part of the co-creation activities in the project and this innovation has helped to breakdown silo working and thinking, thus promoting collaboration and expertise-sharing. The attendees of the summative knowledge exchange used Flinga as a way of organising their thoughts on the Committee and how this approach (or group of people) can be used in future to drive forward social innovations in health care in Reggio-Emilia.

The People’s Voice Media provided the online facilitation that supported this exchange and also captured some people’s experiences of the pilot via a storytelling activity. What we loved about this event, is that it was using ‘evaluation’ not as an end point, but as a driver for on-going change, learning and development. So despite it being called as ‘summative knowledge exchange’ due to the pilot and CoSIE project approaching their end, the session was focus on what is going to happen next, which we believe is key to maintaining and improving public services.