Earlier this month our team finally – after almost a year of working remotely – managed to me the EUARENAS consortium in-person in Helsinki, Finland. Although, the jam-packed meeting schedule meant that we didn’t get to see much of what Helsinki has to offer, we did get to get into discussions about participatory and deliberative democracies. So, here’s a bit of a run down of what we took away from the meeting…

On day one, the City of Helsinki presented a case study of how they’d been engaging with citizens. A big takeaway for us was that the first step in this process was the creation of principles for participation that help guide all future activities. The importance of being clear on what underpins participation was a key point highlighted by the City as this helps you to navigate what follows – sort of like how Responsible Storytelling practices underpins Community Reporting, an acts as a guide on storytelling practice.

When discussing how the case study research into existing deliberative and participatory practices would be conducted, partners exchanged thoughts on how Community Reporting and focus interviews could be used to gather different perspectives on each case study. Questions over how authentic people would be with their accounts if it was not anonymous and how we could enable political leaders and other decision-makers to speak honestly given that what they say may cause issues in their careers were raised. The takeaway from this discussion for us was how fundamental relationships of trust are to this type of work, and the importance of creating spaces in which people can share their experiences openly. Hopefully, the project’s forthcoming guidelines on how to work with different actors in the research processes will help in this respect.

On day two, we started to create a common project language – or glossary of terms – that we would use with consistency across the different research activities in the project. What was interesting during this activity was the different perspectives that people from academic, policy and civil society brought to the discussion. Some opted for more pragmatic and to-the-point definitions of key terms, whereas others went for more nuanced and intricate definitions. For us, it seemed that people’s sector played a bigger role in how they approached the definitions than cultural differences.

This day was also our time to shine and provide the partners with some training in Community Reporting. We played a clip from a story from the EuroCohort project and it was great to see how people reacted to it. When the clip was playing our ‘agenda less’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ approach made sense to our partners and they quickly got to grips with some of our techniques and dialogue interviewed each other about their own experiences of democracy. We also showcased an initial set of guidelines that we’ve been working on that combines lived experience storytelling and future-thinking. Partners will be testing out these guidelines over the coming months and by Summer 2022, we’ll have a public set to release – so please do, watch this space!

On the final day, LUISS delivered an interactive workshop on impact. As part of the workshop we worked in groups to start to determine the impact indicators of the pilots in the project. A key point in the subsequent discussion was how do we develop indicators for less tangible impacts (i.e. better quality relationships). This is something that purely quantitative evidence could not demonstrate and is a core thing the project will be grappling with.

And finally, we wanted to give a bit of a shout out to a new tool we were introduced to LUISS – Aha slides: https://ahaslides.com/v2/ This online tool helps with live quizzing and word cloud generation via a presentation format, and seemed to work really well from a range of devices. Definitely one we will be trying out in the future!

People’s Voice Media have teamed up with the NHS in Greater Manchester to gather local people’s recent experiences (i.e., the last 12 months) of GP services. We are gathering these stories to explore what GP services are like for people who are accessing them, exploring what is working well and what could be better. The stories will be used to open up a public conversation in Greater Manchester about GP Services by sharing different people’s stories online and in real world settings.

Who we are looking for

We are looking to commission existing Community Reporters and/or people with experience of storytelling and lived experience based in Greater Manchester to help to gather these stories from communities they are connected with. We are interested in hearing from a diversity of voices from across the area. If you would like to apply for this commission, you would need to:

1. Be able to attend a briefing/training session online at 10am – 12:30pm, Thursday 14^th December.
2. Be able to gather at least audio and/or video 3 stories (this could include you own) about recent experiences of GP services and return them to us (with consent forms) by 7^th January. These stories must be from people living in Greater Manchester. Stories can be gathered in-person or online.
3. Be able to undertake this commission on a freelance/self-employed basis.

Fees

The fee for attending the training AND gathering 3 stories with consent forms is: £200 
The fee for attending the training AND gathering 5 stories with consent forms is: £275

A member of our team will support you remotely to undertake this commission and help overcome any difficulties.

People who contribute their story will also be provided with a £10 e-Gift voucher as a thank you. 

How to get involved

To apply for this commission please complete this short form by 5pm Tuesday 30^th November and we will let successful applicants know by 3^rd December. 

Or if you’d like to share your story you can:

1. Email enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk and we will find a way to include your experience in this piece of work
2. If you have an account on the Community Reporter website, you can upload your own story directly to it (and on ‘ICR Activity’ label it ‘Experiences of GP Services’. Drop us an email to tell us it is there on enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk and we will arrange your £10 e-Gift voucher as a thank you.

Alternatively, if you are an organisation or group in Greater Manchester that would like us to run a free online (or potentially in-person) storytelling session with you, to give you the opportunity to contribute a story then please do get in touch by 30th November on enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk

Last month we worked with the Women’s Voice Movement and Inspiring Change Manchester to look at the different types of strengths that women have as part of a Conversation of Change event.

Over the last year, we’ve been working with women to gather stories about their experiences of the pandemic, some of which you can listen to in this short film. From these stories, we could hear how women were talking in different ways about how they have got through lockdowns, how they have supported others, how they have supported themselves and other related topics. This led us to think about how can we highlight the different strengths and capacities that women have and how can we ask services to think differently about how they work with women?

With this in mind, we invited women from across Manchester and people working in services that support women to an online discussion about the strength of women. From this discussion, we identified that the women in the stories we listened to:

• have lots of ability and skills but find it hard sometimes to identify them or speak about them publicly
• are good at adapting and finding ways to get through tough times
• really resilient and can change direction when needed
• value having spaces to stop, think and reflect
• are great at supporting one another
• value connections – including with individuals, services and their faith – when facing difficult times

From this, we began to explore what services and we could start to do different to work with women’s strengths in more meaningful ways. Ideas such as reframing questions that services ask women about their lives from ones that always focus on negatives, to ones that identify strengths and creating flexible spaces were women can talk, share experiences and reflect with others about how to address challenges they are facing were discussed.

The group of women behind the workshop are now in the process of making plans to continue this conversation and take some of these ideas forward into action.

Ever thought about what is driving change in the world? Ever thought about what that might mean for how our communities, societies and world might look?

These are the kind of questions we are exploring as part of the EUARENAS project that is looking at how people are involved – or not – in democracy, decision-making and change processes. As part of this work, People’s Voice Media is leading a set of future-thinking activities. We’ve started by looking at what we can learn from conversations happening in the media now about what the future of our communities, cities and societies might look like.

To help us in this, we’ve recently run an online workshop for people from across Europe in which we’ve been exploring questions such as What does the future look like for societies, communities and people across Europe? How can citizens and their voices be more active, included and represented within governance and decision-making arenas? Where are our cities and democracies heading?

In this workshop, we looked at snapshots of media content – videos to written articles – and identified some key messages in them. These included, views that were critical of the European Union’s democratic faculties, how climate change is a key challenge and we must start to act now, the acknowledgment that human rights issues and discrimination against minority communities must be addressed equally across Europe and a general pessimism about society’s current state (i.e., many inequalities). 

Based on this, we thought about what were the key drivers of change in our societies, and came up with some suggestions:

• COVID-19 has accelerated change in certain arenas – i.e., working from home, less travel, more use of digital technologies to connect people 
• Potential legislation in countries like the UK around protests and journalism could lead to negative changes in how people engage in democracy and civic discussion 
• A resurgence of neighbourliness and local connections as a result of COVID-19 may change how we participate in our communities and create change where we are 
• Technology – such as social media – is contributing to a ‘cancel culture’ that could be detrimental to providing space for conversations and different perspectives to be explored 

These findings – and others from the EUARENAS project – will be brought together into an insight briefing later in the year. When we have it all ready to go, we will share it with you on this blog. 

Here at People’s Voice Media we work across a range of projects in the UK and across Europe, from small-scale one-off local events to multi-year international programmes… and everything else in-between. With our workload fluctuating and due to the range of things we are involved in we regularly work with freelance associates with different skills to collaborate with our team and the people we work with to bring about social change and strive towards social justice.

At the moment, we are increasingly needing freelance support to help us deliver workshops, conversations and training and, therefore, are looking to build relationships with facilitators across the UK. If you would like to find out more about what we do, who we are looking for and how you could work alongside us, then:

• download and read through this call
• register your interest on this form

Looking forward to hearing from you!