So, 2022 saw us bring back our annual Community Reporter conference for the fourth time. This time we were back to a large-ish in-person event, with online/hybrid elements and were focusing on talking about power and lived experience.

The event had a range of talks, workshops and activities that were hooked around exploring:

• Who controls the narrative? Basically who is setting the agenda in ‘lived experience storytelling’ spaces.
• Whose story do we hear? And perhaps most importantly, whose story are we not hearing and why?
• Who watches the watchmen? Are those of us who work in the co-production space (i.e. folk like us!) being critical enough of ourselves and how we may be unwittingly upholding power imbalances?

The day kicked off with some short soapbox talks from attendees who shared their own perspectives on power and lived experience. Ben shared a talk titled ‘Offering closure to your past self and others through sharing lived experiences’, Selva came and talked about real and faux co-production and Eleanor created a powerful video exploring disability and power.

From here we went to a workshop delivered by people involved in the Closed Cultures project, that asked attendees to reflect on how subtle power imbalances and control can lead to closed cultures developing… and most importantly, what role we can play in addressing this. Later in the day, a group of researchers asked us to reflect on language and power – exploring the hidden and not-so-hidden power dynamics that are at play in language and how it is used. Following this session, the ‘What is the value of co-production’ project took the stage and explored how we can create the right conditions for co-production to flourish; trust and relationships came through strong here. And finally, we wrapped up the day with what our team has been learning through the work that we do and showcasing some of the fab stuff that is happening in the spaces we work. We heard from Curators of Changes about the ‘iceberg of co-production, from BLAST Fest about their work in exploring science and technology through Black arts and culture and from Sparkle Media about their role in bringing different voices into the media.

If you missed the day, don’t worry we’ve created a folder that you can download the slides from. You can access it here. We’ve also made a folder of interesting stuff we’d love to share with you – toolkits, reports, animations and things… have a gander here.

Any more events coming?

Well, we have an online Community Reporter catch-up happening in September. You can get a FREE ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/community-reporter-network-online-meet-up-2-2022-tickets-332056749677

We run 2 online catch-ups per year for the people, groups and organisations that make-up the Community Reporter network. They are a great way for members to keep up-to-date with what is happening in the Community Reporter network, learn new stuff, share expertise, find out about opportunities they can get involved in, meet other members, network and much more. 

And if you’re not a member of the Community Reporter network… then don’t worry – you can still come along and find out more about us! See you there!

As part of England’s Co-Production Week 2022, we teamed up with Ideas Alliance, the partners on the Not Another Co-Production project and co-producers from across the country to deliver our first ‘Not Another Co-Production Festival‘. This little blog will give you a glimpse of some of the day’s shenanigans.

So, what happened then?

Well, as someone, somewhere once said “if you build it, they’ll come”… and that certainly came true at the Science and Industry Museum earlier this week. Lead by the fab crew at Ideas Alliance the vision for a ‘learning festival’ that felt different to conventional events and was most of all, fun – came to life. Around 200 people came through the doors to take part in silent discos, interactive performances, listening spaces, workshops, talks, chat shows, games, public living rooms and much more. The aim of the day was to bring people together to have conversations about co-production, make connections and explore the challenges within this space. On the day, topics explored included faux production (you know the kind – when weak versions of consultations are packaged as ‘coproduction’ because it’s the ‘in thing’ to do), why are co-production spaces so white? (and what can we do to change this), how to be more human (have a gander at the Camerados principles for a helping hand in this) and much more.

Sounds great – what’s next?

Well, first the team needs to regroup a little and do something thinking over what worked in the space we created and what didn’t – or what cold be better next time. Then we will be starting the next year of the project in the West Midlands. Over the Summer, we’ll be looking at what this looks like and releasing some more details by late Summer/early Autumn about how you can get involved. We will be in touch with more info soon!

Greater Manchester NHS supported by Aqua, and People’s Voice Media have been developing approaches to supporting people with Long Covid.

To help inform this work, our team have been working with people experiencing Long Covid as part of a series of Community Reporting sessions in which people have shared what it is like to live with the illness. We believe that stories are great ways of learning from one another and can be powerful ways of communicating. The stories people have shared with us has shed light on how Long Covid impacts on people’s lives and what support would help people through it.

So, what did we learn from the stories?

Some of the key insights in the stories were:

• Compassionate care – focussing on how people are listened to, validated, treated in more human ways, showing empathy. In short, clinicians and professionals in the system need to be more human and less ‘process focussed’ 
• It’s not one size fits all – the lists of symptoms are different for different people. People’s experiences are unique. It’s also a changing thing; there are good days and bad days – it’s a bit like snakes and ladders 
• Emotional, psychological support is good when it happens, but inconsistent for some, hard to access, and there are long waiting times. In this respect, peer support is really important. Some people were offered it this and some were not – it felt inconsistent. Also, sometimes peer support has become ‘NHSified’ 
• Support is fragmented – no one is treating or welcoming the whole person, each symptom is treated in isolation.

This short film summarises the key points from across a larger set of stories and concludes with some recommendations for the health and social care sector for supporting people with Long Covid.

Over the past three years, we’ve been working with community and learning organisations across Europe as part of the CONCRIT project to explore critical thinking, storytelling and digital literacy in informal learning environments. As part of this work, we’ve produce a toolkit that provides a learning path to support trainers/informal educators to embed media literacies and digital skills in their training and community learning programmes.

The core modules in this toolkit are:

• Introduction To Media Literacy and Digital Storytelling in Civic Education
• Developing Digital Skills and Using Digital Tools
• Identifying Specific Media Literacies and Digital Storytelling Needs in Different Communities
• Safe and Responsible Practice

These four easy-to-use modules give accessible explanations and practical tasks to guide you through the different facets of media literacy and digital storytelling. Take a look and see how you can use the activities in your own work!

For many years, storytelling has been applied as a tool for learning and change-making. In recent years, lived experience storytelling in particular, has thrived as a tool for social justice, via the creation of spaces for discussion and exchange. Over the last 6 months, we have been experimenting with combining our own lived experience storytelling method – Community Reporting – with future-thinking activities as part of EUARENAS.

Foresight – or future thinking – provides scope for people to think about the future and use this to model and respond to potential prospective circumstances. In an ever-changing world, it asks us to think about our future, what challenges are on the horizon and how we can address them to achieve shared outcomes. To explore the future of democracy in Europe, partners in Italy, Estonia and Poland have worked with citizens to share experience of democracy in the present day and use them to discuss what the future may hold. In these workshops, citizens used the three horizon framework to map various pathways for the future of democracy in their context.

In the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, they worked with 13 people who were active in their communities and involved in civil society activities. One of the ‘preferred’ visions for the future that this group stated, was that they wanted to increase the diversity of voices involved in democracy: “I only hope that these councils will not always be attended by the same people”. In Voru, Estonia they worked with young people to explore their ideas about democracy and hopes for the future. Similar to the citizens in Reggio Emilia, they wanted to enhance diversity as they felt that currently “the voice of a minority is often not heard”. Finally, in Gdansk, Poland they worked with a heterogeneous group of citizens. Reflecting on the workshop, the Polish team felt that the workshop’s methods supported citizens to speak up – “It is important to sincerely listen to people’s stories, and even sometimes when we lose the topic of discussion, let them talk – because for some people it is the first time that they have a voice.”

In July we will be launching a ‘Lived Experience Storytelling and Future-Thinking’ toolkit and later in the year, we will be sharing with you the learning from these activities as part of an Insight Briefing.