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.

Community Reporting is a digital storytelling movement that started in 2007. At its essence, is people using digital tools such as smartphones, tablets and now Zoom to gather lived experience stories from people that they know. Using the Internet, digital media, events and much more, the Community Reporter movement shares these stories with other people, groups and organisations who are in a position to make positive social change.

Fundamental to Community Reporting is the belief that stories are vehicles that build bridges between people and support common understanding. The Community Reporters gather stories on all kinds of topics from across different countries. Take Patrick’s story for example. In this story he shares his experience of volunteering during the pandemic. You can also look at aar0nn’s story about their visit to the Poppy Trail in the Remembrance Woodland area at Rozelle Park or listen to the story Mistarareunite captured in Germany about a Computer Science student’s experiences of physical distancing measures. You also might want to hear what vanessa123 says about her experiences of with social workers or Shaked’s story about applying for asylum.

The Community Reporter website currently has over 5700 stories of people’s experiences of world and here at People’s Voice Media we are completely committed to working with our movement to use the knowledge in these stories to create social change. We do this in various ways, such as writing policy papers (like this one on re-humanising public services), creating short video edits on specific topics (like this one aimed at opening up a conversation about FGM), releasing playlists of extracts on specific topics that share different perspectives (like these on co-production) and much more.

But we know that none of this would be possible without our Community Reporters and their stories. So as part of Make A Difference Day 2020, we want to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has shared a story with us over the years and have played their part – one story at a time – in making our world a better place to be!

Hello Everyone! Hayley here from the People’s Voice Media team.

Whilst I now may be a little ‘zoomed out’, I just wanted to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who made this year’s Institute of Community Reporters’ conference possible. Thank you to every speaker and workshop leader. Also a BIG thank you to all of you who came, shared your ideas, energy and enthusiasm for collaboration, co-production, co-creation… or whatever we call it when we work together to do awesome stuff!

Running through the different events, it was clear that there is a growing push for us to ‘be more human’ (I’ve stolen a Camerados slogan here). It seems that more and more of us are wanting to get back to basics, to connect with folk in very real (even if digital) ways. We discussed the things that may be wrong with our worlds and the institutions and infrastructures that govern them… but we also shared experiences of when humanity is at its best. There were also spaces created in which we could own our own lack of knowledge, challenge each other and learn from others – I hope we can continue to create these spaces and strengthen them in the future. What came through is how important those environments are and how we always need to be reflecting on what we do and why we do it. We should be more open to criticism and see that as a learning opportunity, not a negative (I’m personally trying to work on this!). We need to get more ‘comfortable’ with the ‘uncomfortable’ and be open to having our perspectives questioned. After all if we can’t do that with one another – who is going to watch the watchmen? 😉

With all the events done, I’m left with two feelings. Firstly, the feedback we have had on our work – what’s going right and where we can be better – has boosted my energy and given me ideas to take forward. It has left me and other members of the team ‘buzzing’ to see how people are connecting with storytelling and its potential to create real change. Secondly, and this is perhaps what I am most grateful for on a personal level, is that I feel less alone. There were many of you who popped-up at various events and connecting with you has made me feel less of a lone wolf, and more like a member of a pack. Let’s keep working together. x

“Nobody has a voice – only those in power at the unemployment services. With one strike of a pen they mess up your lives.”

Positively or negatively, services have direct impact on people’s lives and this means that the people working in services, regardless of position, have a relative degree of power. Power isn’t necessarily a bad thing either. Having the power to change something for the better and using such power to do so, is something we should all be striving to do in our lives. Where power is problematic, is when it is distributed in vastly inequitable ways. It is problematic when people making decisions – those with the ‘pen’ – make such choices at a distance from the people whom those decisions affect. It is problematic when this void leads to decision-making without empathy and a prioritising of process over people. Ultimately this leads to poor decision-making and ineffective services. Our work across the UK and Europe involves gathering stories about how people experience the world. 

Over the last couple of years, we’ve noticed a concerning trend amongst a significant proportion of people’s stories when they are talking about experiences of services. These stories span different communities, countries and sectors and collectively they have shown us that we need to ‘rehumanise’ services and put people back at their centre. In many instances, process has replaced common sense, and protocol has replaced humanity. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this need to re-evaluate how our services function has never been greater. Physically we may be more distanced than ever before, so we must work harder to build connections at a human level. In short, we must step out from behind the spreadsheet and connect at an emotional level in order to move forward. This briefing therefore argues that services should focus on the building of relationships, not the building of systems.