Late last month part of our team was in Brussels for the final meeting of the EuroCohort Development Project (ECDP). ECDP is a Design Study which will create the specification and business case for a European Research Infrastructure that will provide, over the next 25 years, comparative longitudinal survey data on child and young adult well-being. The infrastructure developed by ECDP will subsequently coordinate the first Europe wide cohort survey, named EuroCohort.

Integrated into this project, was a stream of work focusing on engaging children and young people in research projects. This part of the project ensures that the voice of children, young people and the parents/guardians of very young children are captured in ECDP so that there is a co-production in the development of the scientific tools and processes. It focused on working with groups of children and young people in the UK and Croatia.

Activities related to this included the establishment of Young People’s Advisory Groups (CYPAG) and the training of young people as Community Reporters and in different storytelling techniques. The Community Reporter’s captured youth voice on the topic of wellbeing. The CYPAG’s also embedded storytelling in their activities to support young people to contribute to the research project’s design. You see all of their stories here. The stories and Community Reporting processes adopted in ECDP were used to create a written analysis on what wellbeing means to young people and also produce a toolkit on how to engage young people in research project. More so, a short document on some of the key learnings from the CYPAG group in Croatia can be downloaded here.

The final day of the meeting was dedicated to a conference – EuroCohort: Growing Up in Europe. This conference brought together key stakeholders, national, European and international level policy-makers, funding bodies and academics as part of a launch event for the EuroCohort: Growing Up in Europe study. It shared learnings from the development project and showed how insights from Growing Up in Europe will support better policy-making and impact on the lives of children and young people.

And guess what? The Community Reporter stories took centre stage, with the voices of young people from Croatia and Zagreb bringing to life the many themes of the study – from happiness to digital life. Another Community Reporting success!

New project alert…

The People’s Voice Media team are currently working with the Ideas Alliance, Dudley Council, the Citizens Advice Bureau and Black Country Foodbank to gather stories about people’s lived experiences of poverty. This will help to inform services and strategies to help address poverty in the Dudley area and it will support Black Country Foodbank to develop funding applications, so they reach more people in need. The stories will also be used as part of a report and also in an exhibition that aims to break down stigma surrounding poverty and raise awareness about the issues at a local level.

So far on the project, we have been running some orientation sessions with people living and working in Dudley to let them know what our plans are and to get their feedback on them. We’ve also run a pop-up storytelling with staff from a local Citizens Advice Bureau and captured their experiences of supporting people living in poverty.

In December and January we will be running some Community Reporter training and gathering stories from people accessing local food banks as well. By the end of the project, we hope to have a range of stories covering areas such as the ways that people try to manage their money, experiences of formal and informal support and the challenges that poverty brings to people lives and how it impacts on them and the people around them.

With the stories shared with us, we will then start working in partnership with the Council and others to look at how people’s lives can be made better and what local solutions their are to poverty in the area. We’ll give you an update next year on how this project progresses and hopefully have some solutions to share with you.

Earlier this month the People’s Voice Media team attended the kick-off meeting in Berlin for our new Erasmus+ funded project – CONCRIT. The project aims to work towards a socially cohesive Europe, which requires self-confident, fully informed and educated citizens. To support this, ourselves and partners will be investigating the topics of community narration and digital literacies, exploring their role in civic education. Through this research, we will produce learner driven tools, ways to build a community and techniques to de-construct discriminatory stereotypes.

Partners involved in the project are from Poland, Germany, Italy and the UK and contribute different expertise and perspectives. People involved in the project work in participatory arts, support services for people experiencing issues such as mental ill health, civic participation fields and sports development arenas. This multidisciplinary team are seeking to pool our collective intelligence and learn from one another and wider stakeholders, in order to create training programmes and training activities pertinent to digital literacies.

We are currently in the research phase of the project, with the start of next year being focused on developing training materials and resources. The project will then move onto testing out these outputs and refining them. There’ll be opportunities for People’s Voice Media’s partners and stakeholders to get involved – so if you’re interested, let us know!

The meeting coincided with the 30 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is a timely reminder of the constant need to keep knocking down the barriers between people – whether they are physical or ideological – in order to build inclusive and welcoming communities. We’ll keep you updated on how the project progresses in its aim and contributes to this vision next year.

As we all know, co-creation processes aren’t best delivered by a fixed plan and are not linear in nature. The fluidity and flexibility of co-creation are core strengths of this practice. However, a key challenge ahead for the CoSIE project – a pan-European applied research project looking at how public services can be co-created – is to produce a roadmap for how co-creation can be done.

Exploring what this blueprint might look like was a key focus of a recent CoSIE project meeting in Athens. Ideas brought forward by the consortium was that it could take the form of a metro map with various routes depending on which position you were entering co-creation from, another suggestion was that it could be a Prezi with links and video content embedded and there was also the tongue-in-cheek proposition that it could be like a dating app – the Tinder of co-creation!

What was clear from these discussions was that the usualy lengthy PDF documents and toolkits that are produced on this matter are not what this consortium want to re-make. Instead, the project dares to be different. We dare to innovate and challenge pre-conceptions of what ‘roadmaps’ are. Fundemental to this, is that the blueprint must be accessible to everyone wanting to co-create in public services. For People’s Voice Media, a core part of this will be making it ‘human’ and about people. That means cutting out all the buzzwords and terminology that has lost its meaning, and instead using everyday language that people can really connect with.

Anyway, that’s our two pence worth on the matter… let’s see what is co-created on this journey!

Earlier this month we took part in National Co-Production Week with the Co-Production Oxfordshire team at their 1-day festival. The festival was a mixture of guest speakers, stalls, participatory workshops and experiential opportunities that looked at co-production from different angles.

At the festival we delivered a micro Conversation of Change session in which people could experience how we work with stories of lived experience to create a dialogue amongst people with different perspectives. Using stories gathered as part of the CoSIE project in the workshop and learnings from delivering Conversation of Change events in this project’s pilots in the UK and Italy, participants got to grips with story dialogue techniques and how stories can be used in co-production environments. Feedback from particpants was great and we spotted a post-it note comment that really made our day – “Loved Community Reporting – this should be used as a basis for all service redesign”. 

A big thank you to the Co-Production Oxfordshire for inviting us and it was great to chat to some like-minded folk and share ideas!