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!

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.

This is our fourth blog in a series about how Community Reporting has been used as a tool for co-creation in the CoSIE project. In this blog post, we wanted to share with you some of the learning from applying Community Reporting as a tool for reflection, and explore some of our successes and challenges during this process…

In the CoSIE project, Community Reporting has been used as a tool that encourages introspective reflection to support co-evaluation processes, providing opportunities for different stakeholders to explore what is working/valued, what is not working/valued, and future directions and sustainability. Some of the key strengths in using Community Reporting in this way have been:

• It supports introspection in a quick and accessible manner, and can support people’s individual self-development as well as the development of services.
• It can be applied at different moments in a co-creation process to provide on-going learning and development, rather than just summative evaluation.
• It supports active and deep listening that helps people to better understand different perspectives and situations.

Speaking about Community Reporting as a tool for reflection, the Spanish pilot identified that the unemployed people they are working with to set-up their own businesses used Community Reporting to become more “conscious about their journey” and could better seen their own development. Similarly, the Hungarian pilot found that it helped the families involved in their household economies project “articulate their minds on their present and previous situations”. This was achieved at both a “surface and also on a deeper level“.

A potential limitation of the method as a tool for reflection is that you cannot always guarantee that people will share their reflections consistently over a period of time. For example, as the Community Reporters gather and share their own stories voluntarily they can choose when to contribute and when not to. This makes it difficult, but not impossible, to do a longitudinal style reflection.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore the impact that Community Reporting has had as part of the CoSIE project, and 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 or a tool for dialogue, then click on the links.

This is our third blog in a series about how Community Reporting has been used as a tool for co-creation in the CoSIE project. In this blog post, we wanted to share with you some of learning from applying Community Reporting as a tool for dialogue between different people, and explore some of our successes and challenges during this process…

In the CoSIE project, Community Reporting as a tool for dialogue has been used as an initial engagement activity for stakeholders, to generate ideas for the pilots and to exchange knowledge between different people, groups and organisations. Some of the key strengths in using Community Reporting in this way have been:

• It supports people to think ‘out of the box’ and from ‘different perspectives’. This can help improve problem-solving.
• It helps people, groups and organisations to share knowledge via storytelling and thus more effectively learn from one another’s experiences.
• Its focus on equity helps to provides opportunities for people with opposing or differing perspectives and experiences to engage in a non-hierarchical dialogue. In doing so, voices that are often unheard are listened to.

Reflecting on their usage of Community Reporting as a tool for dialogue, the Italian pilot talks about how stories gathered from families about their wellbeing and health, helped to highlight “less obvious issues and helped in rethinking the project in some way” for the healthcare professionals involved. In essence, providing a scenario in which stories from families could be heard by medical workers and the people steering the pilot, helped them to see things from their perspective. This ultimately led to the understanding that the App they were seeking to create to tackle childhood obesity needed to be more relational. More so, the UK pilot felt that through the Conversation of Change events, the probation service was able to “hear people’s views directly” and speak together as people on probation, peer mentors/volunteers, probation workers and service managers to celebrate what is working but also address what isn’t.

In terms of the issues we encountered in using Community Reporting as a dialogue tool in CoSIE, it was felt sometimes that it was hard to reach a consensus between different perspectives as there were too many ideas. More so, for the Swedish pilot, they felt that it was too difficult for the people with cognitive disabilities they worked with to participate in a dialogue about their stories with decision-makers. To get over this obstacle, the pilot used recordings of the stories at key decision-making meetings as a means of bringing those people’s experiences to the space.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore how Community Reporting has been applied as tool for reflection in the CoSIE project, and if you want to read the introductory blog in this series or the previous one on how we’ve used Community Reporting as a tool for insight, then click on the hyperlinked words.

Wellbeing from the Margins: Thinking strategically about how you can better support people’s wellbeing in Greater Manchester

Online Knowledge Exchange Event / 10:30am – 12:00pm / Thursday 21st May 2020 – BOOK NOW!

“I’ve never had a place to call home, I’ve never felt settled…” Imagine being the person behind this statement. How would you feel? How different would your life be? How would you cope?

People’s Voice Media and our partners at Gorsehill Studios, The Men’s Room and Winning Hearts and Mindshave been delivering separate but interconnected activities that have involve people from across Greater Manchester sharing their stories about their health and wellbeing. The stories gathered provide a rich and intricate understanding of wellbeing from the perspectives of people who are often marginalised, overlooked by services or who have the least resource and power in society such as young people in the care system, sex workers and people experiencing health, housing and economic inequalities. 

Tying in with Mental Health Awareness Week 2020, we are delivering this online knowledge exchange to share with you the learning about people’s wellbeing that have emerged from these stories, and the recommendations we are making based these insights. We are looking for strategic decision-makers and leaders from across the third and public sectors in health & social care fields and beyond, in Greater Manchester to join us rethink what we know about wellbeing. Building on the new ways of working and partnerships that have emerged during the COVID-19 response, the event will catalyse approaches to making our services and support structures kinder and more human in their nature, led by empathy and understanding. 

As part of this participatory workshop we will:

• Listen to unheard voices on varied topics that are connected to wellbeing such as experiences of the care system, volunteering, housing, neighbourhoods and addiction.
• Exchange ideas, knowledge and ways of working that can support the recommendations based on the insights from the lived experience stories. 
• Respond by identifying opportunities for change within our own service delivery, organisational policies or wider strategic directions that will better support wellbeing.

This is your opportunity to listen to often overlooked voices, and think strategically about how you and your organisation can respond pro-actively on a local level and in collaboration with others. CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR PLACE!

Instructions of how to attend this online event will be sent out to attendees via email. All you will need is a laptop/tablet/smartphone with an Internet connection. Places are limited so please only book if you 100% intend to join.