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, and our movement of Community Reporters, that people who are under-resourced and who often occupy the positions of least power are involved in this dialogue. This is why we are launching an Institute of Community Reporters collective project – #COVIDConversations – to gather stories about the crisis from voices that may go unheard.

In response to requests of our partners from across Europe, we have created a space on the Community Reporter website for an online archive of everyday experiences of the life during the COVID-19 outbreak. We plan to work with these stories in the future and share the learnings in them with a wider audience. It is important that these stories are not forgotten and that the insights in them are heard and use in the future as we rebuild and change our world. It is vital that all kinds of voices are included and that the people who share and gather these stories are active actors in this moment of change within our shared history.

So, how can you get involved?

1. COMMUNITY REPORTER – CALL TO ACTION
   We are asking all of our existing Community Reporters to log into www.communityreporter.net and upload your own personal story about your experiences of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. This can be a short piece of text, a photo, an audio clip or video. When you upload them, make sure you select ‘COVID Conversations’ as the ICR Network on the drop-down menu. Click here to download a quick ‘How to upload your story’ guide.
2. UPSKILLING THE NETWORK
   We will be running an online training session for existing active Community Reporters, existing Trainers, current Social Licensees and wider Support Partners to equip them with the skills to gather stories via remotely. The session will be delivered in May (date TBC) and each attendee will then gather 5+ stories each from their own networks, with a keen focus on unheard voices. If you’ve like to take part, email us. Places are limited.
3. ONLINE STORYTELLING SESSIONS
   The People’s Voice Media team will be delivering one-to-one storytelling sessions with people online and via the phone, to gather their experiences of the crisis. These sessions are designed to include people who may otherwise be excluded, and will run on the 10th and 23rd June. We are asking our partners and members to help us find people to participate. If you know someone who is willing to share an experience and would like to speak one-to-one with our team, drop us an email.

This is our second 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 our learnings from applying Community Reporting as a tool for insight gathering, and explore some of our successes and challenges during this process…

In the CoSIE project, Community Reporting as an insight tool has been applied to collate and analyse stories about topics pertinent to the co-creation processes (i.e. to better understand the problem being tackled through the co-creation process). Some of the key strengths in using Community Reporting in this way have been:

• It gathers richer qualitative data than other more traditional research approaches do and helps to better understand ‘wicked’ or complex problems.
• It can help services to better engage with groups who would otherwise not usually have their voices heard – storytelling as a medium and our peer-to-peer approach is generally seen as being accessible to most people.
• It can help to address power imbalances between services and the people who access them by providing citizens with a chance to set the agenda.
• It provides a method for working with stories so that experiential knowledge can be gleaned from them and used as an alternative form of data.

Speaking about their experience of working with Community Reporting, the pilot in the Netherlands stated that “It’s not rocket science. It’s a basic thing that, as a civil servant, we tend to have an agenda – a well-meaning agenda but an agenda nonetheless. [Community Reporting] took us away from our agenda and allowed people to make their own.” In doing so, they got a richer understanding of the issues behind why people were unemployed in their municipality than they did from statistics. This reframed how they thought about the problem, and thus influenced the interventions that the pilot is currently testing out.

In terms of some of the challenges we have encountered in using Community Reporting in the project, we found that:

• It can take more time and resource to apply than other simpler data collation techniques (i.e. surveys)
• It can be difficult for some groups to engage with due to the digital technologies involved and the barriers they present
• It is an innovative tool for data gathering and sometimes not recognised by traditional ‘powers’

Speaking about one of these barriers, the Polish pilot explains how the older people they were working with “don’t get on well with the technology… it’s really hard for them“. Despite this, what they did connect with, was the idea of belonging to a social change movement and they have used this identity to spear-head change in their area.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore how Community Reporting has been applied as tool for dialogue in the CoSIE project, and if you want to read the introductory blog in this series, you can do so here.

Over the last two-and-a-half years, People’s Voice Media has been leading a stream of work in the CoSIE project that supports public services across Europe to uses Community Reporting as a tool for co-creation. In the UK, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Finland and Sweden, we have worked with different services – from employment support to probation services – to embed storytelling and lived experience into their service design, delivery, and evaluation in meaningful ways. Over the next month or so, we are going to blog some of the key learnings from this experience here…

So, where to start? Well, firstly through looking back with hindsight at the ways we have used Community Reporting in the different public services, we can see that this application can be summarised into three key ways:

1. As a tool for insight
2. As a tool for dialogue
3. As a tool for reflection

While these three types of application are distinct, there are overlaps between them and they can be combined as the Venn diagram below details.

As an insight tool, Community Reporting broadly fits into the realms of participatory and empowerment research fields. It engages citizens, people who work in services and other stakeholders to be a part of an insight-gathering and identifying process by sharing their stories and co-curating them into concrete findings. Through this, traditional power imbalances between the researcher and the research subject are reduced.

As a tool for creating dialogue, Community Reporting aids communication by providing people with the tools to use storytelling to engage in conversations with their peers and other people beyond their peer groups. Using stories as part of Conversation of Change events stimulates dialogue between different stakeholders about a topic, issue, service etc. Community Reporter stories can also be used as communication aids to talk to decision-makers. Such practices enable different voices and understandings of the world to be explored in an equitable manner, and can help to make decision-making processes transparent.

Finally, as a tool for reflection, Community Reporting supports people to reflect on their experiences and the experiences of others. This proactive, critical reflection provides people with the space and time to more deeply understand how they and others experience the world, and thus support people to identify how public (and other) services can better support their needs.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore how Community Reporting has been applied as a tool for insight in the CoSIE project, and identify some of the strengths of this approach, and the challenges we have encountered.

Earlier this month, the People’s Voice Media team were in Utrecht for the annual CoSIE partner meeting and a seminar all about co-creation. Read on to find out more about what they go up to…

The meeting kicked-off with jam-packed seminar that combined academic research, real-world case studies and practical sessions revolving around ways of involving people in the creating and running of public services. Our team worked with some of the CoSIE partners to deliver a workshop that asked people to question the value of ‘co-creation’ to different scenarios and whether or not we should always co-create. The session provoked attendees to think about their own personal value-system when it came to co-creation.

Specifically, an activity in which attendees had to place different engagement techniques on a spectrum between ‘consultation’ and ‘co-creation’ got the room buzzing. For some, focus groups were more a consultation tool but for others, who had rejigged their format, focus groups provided a key mechanism for them to co-create through… all interesting stuff. The activity moved people away from thinking there was a ‘five star’ version of co-creation ready packaged and instead think about the context of the co-creation more deeply. What the learning from the CoSIE project suggests is that co-creation DOES add real value (on different levels) to the design, creation and running of public services BUT finding the places to apply it and thinking about how you are applying it are key. Most of all, it is important to avoid co-creation tokenism! Click here for a great tongue-in-cheek blog of the things to avoid when co-producing from our partner in crime – Cat Duncan-Rees.

Spurred on by the seminar’s discussions, the CoSIE partners got their heads down into working on their own project. The first day of the meeting saw the delivery of internal trainings for the forthcoming summative knowledge exchanges. These events will support the co-evaluation of the pilots and extract the key learnings from the project. Our team was on hand to train partners in dialogue interviewing techniques to support the capturing of reflections from stakeholders. We also equipped the national teams with the skills to incorporate story dialogue techniques into these exchanges. Other training revolved around data curation and visualisation, and a first look at the new Living Labs tool!

From this, we turned our attentions to some of the key outputs of the project – the roadmap and the MOOC. Combining the ideas and learnings of a large consortium into these products isn’t an easy task, but the work packages leaders had it all in hand. The roadmap is taking the format of a metro line, with different stops along the way that people can get on and off at. This tries to address one of the problems people have been outlining about co-creation processes – they are not necessarily linear. Therefore, the multi-directionality of a metro map may just provide the answer – we are looking forward to seeing what is produced and we will update you on it later in the year!

What we took away from this year’s meeting was that at its core co-creation is a power – or to be more specific, the redistribution of power and the interplay of power dynamics. This got us thinking about all kinds of things such as what language you use, questioning of your own perspective, hidden hierarchies and things like that. This food for thought is what we will take away with us and begin to unpick within our own practice and work.

Community Reporter, Social Licensee or a Partner? Join us for an online catch-up with other members of our UK and European network.

We run 2 online catch-ups per year and they are a great way for members to keep up-to-date with what is happening in the Institute of Community Reporters (the ICR), learn new stuff and share expertise, find out about opportunities to get involved with, meet other members, network and much more.

It’s only an hour, so grab a brew and a biscuit, log on and find out what exciting stuff is happening across our network! Register here, and we’ll confirm the platform nearer the time once we have numbers. Full agenda below…

Tuesday 10th March 2020 / 2pm – 3pm UK time / Google Hangouts – Link provided on registration

2:00pm / Welcome and the ICR Update – Hayley Trowbridge (People’s Voice Media)

Find out the lastest news from the ICR and hear all about our plans for revamping the Community Reporter website!

2:15pm / Co-creation public services with Community Reporting – Jessica Dijkman (Houten Municipality) 

Hear how Jessica and her team have been using Community Reporting methodologies to co-create solutions to unemployment a municipality in the Netherlands as part of the CoSIE project. 

2:30pm / The 2nd ICR Annual Conference – Sarah Henderson (People’s Voice Media)

We’ll be giving you all the details about our second conference in June 2020 and how you can be a part of it!

2:45pm / News, Opportunities and Questions from the ICR network 

Your chance to share what Community Reporting activities you’ve been up to, hear about any opportunities in the network and ask questions to the network or for help from other members.

3:00pm / End of Catch-Up and back to work! 😉 BOOK NOW!

*Save the date for the next ICR Online Catch-Up – Tuesday 8th September 2019, 2pm – 3pm (UK time)*