CO-PRODUCTION – CAN YOU FEEL IT?

Tuesday 7th July / 2:00pm – 3:30pm / Register here!

People’s Voice Media have teamed-up with the National Co-Production Advisory Group to facilitate this interactive knowledge exchange as part of #NationalCoproductionWeek.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve been collaborating and using Community Reporting – a pan-European storytelling movement – to gather people’s lived experiences of health and social care from across the country. A key purpose of this work has been to better understand, at a human level, how people experience different health and care services, what it is like to work in this arena, what works well and what doesn’t. These stories have shown us that we need to ‘rehumanise’ services and put heart-led practice at the centre. We must step out from behind the spreadsheet and connect with others at an emotional level in order to move forward.

As part of this workshop, you will have the opportunity to:

1. Listen to some of the stories we have gathered and hear direct accounts of people’s experiences of health and social care

2. Explore how you can use some of the learnings from the stories in your own context 

3. Discuss how what ‘rehumanising the system’ looks like at a practical level and how you can contribute to this (r)evolution!

Following this knowledge exchange, we will be coproducing a policy briefing about the rehumanisation of services – drawing on the stories in this workshop and other lived experiences from different types of services from across Europe. We’ll be incorporating the ideas you share with us as part of this workshop into this later in the year!

REGISTER NOW!

COVID CONVERSATIONS – COLLABORATION THROUGH STORYTELLING

Date: Thursday 9th July 2020 

Time: 1:30pm – 3:00pm   

Register here!

Within the on-going COVID-19 crisis there is a danger that the most marginalised communities across Europe are left out of this conversation. It is important to us, that people who are under-resourced and who often occupy the positions of least power are involved in this dialogue. This is why we launched the #COVIDConversations project that uses Community Reporting techniques to gather stories about the crisis from voices that may go unheard.

As part of National Co-Production Week 2020, we are running this online, interactive workshop to share with you our experiences during the #COVIDConversations project, covering topics such as:

  • Collaborations that led to this project
  • Techniques for delivering storytelling activities online
  • Initial learnings from the stories 

As part of the session, you will also have the opportunity to participate in a bit of digital storytelling and share your experiences of the pandemic with others. Your story will contribute to the growing lived experience archive we are creating. 

The workshop is open to anyone and instructions of how to attend this online event will be sent out to attendees upon registration and via email. All you will need is a laptop/tablet/smartphone with an Internet connection to take part. Places are limited so please only book if you 100% intend to join.

 

WELLBEING FROM THE MARGINS – POLICY BRIEFING LAUNCHED!

COVID-19 has shown us how fragile our wellness is. The pandemic has already had an impact on mental health and will continue to do so. Using the lived experiences of people who are often marginalised by society, this briefing examines how wellbeing can be better supported for everyone. We believe that the answer lies in seeing wellbeing as a set of core values that should underpin how we work with people, to fundamentally address issues surrounding wellness in our society.

The evidence that has informed this briefing has come from Community Reporter stories from across Greater Manchester. Specifically, the stories are from young people in the care system, sex workers and people experiencing health, housing and economic inequalities. This has been supported locally by:

  • The Men’s Room: An arts & health charity that supports men and trans people across Greater Manchester.
  • Gorsehill Studios: A youth-focused charity based in Trafford that works in creative education.
  • Winning Hearts and Minds: A joined-up approach to improving people’s long-term heart and mental health in Manchester.

We have also run a knowledge exchange event based on the findings in this briefing. You can download the slides from this event here.

STORIES OF RECOVERY

Over the last year, People’s Voice Media has been working with PERU from Manchester Metropolitan University and We Are With You (formerly Addaction) in Cornwall to evaluate a new recovery service. Our role has been to use Community Reporting and storytelling to support people who are in recovery to share their experiences of this journey, and to work with frontline workers to gather their stories of delivering the service.

So far, we have delivered some initial storytelling sessions and collaborative sense-making activities. This has allowed us to identify a number of key learnings about what works and what doesn’t work in recovery services and we wanted to share these with you. So, let’s start with the good points… In terms of people’s experiences of the service, the things that people value in terms of support on their recovery journey are:

  • Tailoring the support to people’s personal needs – for example, some people find using public transport very difficult so alternatives were found.
  • Not giving up on people – for example, even if people refused support at first, the workers would persist or offer different types of support until there was a breakthrough
  • Building up strong relationships – for example, allowing workers to have specific people they work with so they can get to know them more
  • Not being judgmental – for example, many of the workers have had addictions before and so the people currently on recovery didn’t feel they were being judged

When reflecting on previous support services (before they got involved with We Are With You), people identified the following issues:

  • They seemed like a box-ticking exercise – they weren’t person centred
  • They expected recovery journeys to be linear – if you missed an appointment you would be taken off the service
  • They didn’t seem to have enough time to offer meaningful support – short appointments were given that didn’t allow for trust to be built
  • They focused on the just the addiction not the whole person – the person’s wider life, needs, capacities etc. weren’t part of the recovery

A key message within these stories, is that recovery is absolutely not a box-ticking exercise that can be applied in the same way for everyone. Instead it is a fluid, non-linear journey that will be unique to each person who experiences it. The stories demonstrate there should not be a one-size-fits-all approach to recovery. More so, recovery is also not something that happens alone. Instead, each person has their own recovery community that can include Recovery Workers, care workers, social workers, medical professionals, family and friends. The strength of these connections and relationships of trust that are built, are central to people being able to overcome their addictions.

We will be releasing a feature article with links to the stories and people’s experiences in their own words later in the year… as well as continuing to work on the evaluation. So watch this space!

THE IMPACT OF COMMUNITY REPORTING IN THE COSIE PROJECT

This is our fifth blog in a series about how Community Reporting has been used as a tool for co-creation in the CoSIE project. In this final blog post, we wanted to share with you some of the impacts that we have had through applying Community Reporting in nine different public services across Europe…

During the CoSIE project a number impacts have been identified and we have divided these into three categories:

  • Individual (ideologies and behaviours):e.g. a person could change their perception of a topic; a professional could change their practice. 
  • Organisational (delivery and spaces):e.g. an organisation may change the ways it does things; a service or space could be re-designed, re-purposed or co-created from scratch.
  • Systemic (society and culture):e.g. a policy could change or be introduced; practice could change across a whole sector; social norms may change. 

If we first look at the impact Community Reporting has had at an individual level, we can see that it has enabled people to develop digital and other transferable skills (i.e. active listening). More so, the concept of using stories for social change purposes has galvanised residents of specific estates and villages (specifically in relation to the Polish and Hungarian pilots) to see themselves as active actors in local change-making processes. Additionally, the insights in some of the stories have changed people’s actions. For example, in the UK pilot a probation worker, upon listening to the stories, decided to make more phone calls to his cases in between formal supervision sessions to make them feel more supported. It has also helped more voices – particularly those from groups who services usually find easy to ignore – to be heard. This has included unemployed people voicing their experiences of encounters with services in the Netherlands, disabled adults’ voices being used to frame the hackathons in Estonia, and young people on the edges of society using their stories to create more accurate personas aimed at influencing service design in Finland.

At an organisational level, we have also made some clear impact. The adoption of Community Reporting in the UK pilot – based in a probation service – completely shifted the organisation’s stance of digital media and the Internet. Initially, the probation service involved in the UK pilot was fearful of the use of digital media and the internet within the service but through the application of Community Reporting they have overcome these reservations as they have seen the benefits of its use in context. As one of the academic partners observed:

Community Reporting was [initially] not well understood – it is very different than social media but people in the staff thought that it was a way of using service user voice for entertainment in a shallow way. We think that, that understanding was based on a very deep-rooted fear in social media in the service of its service user being shamed and stigmatised. 

However, the successfulness of the intervention has shifted this view and led to the pilot gathering the most stories in the project and booking in additional sessions to support the service’s workers’ and volunteers’ learning. Furthermore, they have installed a TV screen in the reception area that plays people’s stories about working for or accessing probation services. This represents an organisational shift in attitude towards this specific type of technology. 

Additionally, the Community Reporter stories have had a direct influence on the delivery of a number of public services. For example, in Spain this led the pilot to move away from a standard business training programme into a more fluid mentoring and peer-learning model. In the Netherlands, this refocused their thinking and set a slightly different agenda (or theory of change) than the pilot had initially anticipated. In Italy, the insights from the families have directly informed the App’s design – shifting focus from a medical model way of thinking to a more social model. More so, through the staff involved in these services being trained in the methodology it means that the organisations now have another tool to use when working with citizens that can support their work in the future.

At a systemic level, the main impact has been in building communities and networks. For example, in Hungary, the participants have established their own closed Facebook group on which they are sharing their stories and using these to share information and knowledge between themselves. This has led to an online community being built. More so, in Poland, they actively engaged wider organisations associated with the emerging Local Activity Centres in the Community Reporting training. This indicates the potential for a city-wide network of organisations in Wroclaw using Community Reporting to better understand the needs of the communities that they serve. 

Whilst there have been some indicators of wider impact, it is unsurprising that systemic impact is an area where little change has occurred. This is because this type of change and impact often takes longer to come into fruition and is usually influenced by interconnected, networked and incremental changes at individual and organisation levels. Furthermore, in the CoSIE project, Community Reporting has not necessarily been aimed at influencing the policy arena – which is a contributor to systemic change – and instead has been applied as a co-creation tool, which lends itself to the individual and organisation impact fields. It also provides different types of data (e.g. experiential knowledge) and understanding (e.g. empathy and non-silo thinking) than institutions are used to working with. It takes time for innovations like this to become less marginalised and more accepted in the mainstream. Essentially, Community Reporting seeks to re-humanise such processes and the services that they govern. This in itself is a paradigmatic shift in terms of how societal and governmental institutions operate, and cannot happen overnight. In short, the move to more relationally-driven rather than process-driven public services, beyond specific pilots and into national and pan-European standards, is a longer journey than the CoSIE project. 

However, it is a journey that People’s Voice Media and the Community Reporter movement are committed to seeing through in the long term. In this vein, we will be hosting a series of online and offline policy-themed events over the next year, as well as producing a ‘practical guide’ to working with experiential knowledge in co-creative ways. In June, we are running an event to help us thing through what this guide will be – so if you’d like to join us to learn about our approach and also share your expertise and ideas, book your place here.

If you want to read the introductory blog in this series or the previous ones on how we’ve used Community Reporting as a tool for insight, as a tool for dialogue or as a tool for reflection, then click on the links.