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!

The CoSIE Horizon 2020 applied research project supported the creation of collaborative partnerships between citizens, public sector agencies and services, non- governmental organisations and civil society actors, and private companies. It researched, through practical application processes, how public services can be enhanced via co- creation.

People’s Voice Media led a stream of work that supported public services across Europe to use lived experience storytelling as a tool for co-creation to support service design, delivery, and evaluation. As part of this work, we used our specific approach to lived experience storytelling – Community Reporting – which is a mixed methodological approach for enhancing citizen participation in research, policy-making, service development, and decision-making processes. Watch this short video to find out more about how lived experience storytelling was used in the CoSIE project.

This toolkit synthesises the key learning from these activities and presents a set of resources to help services work with lived experience.

Active Calderdale wants to better understand the lives of Calderdale residents and how they interact, connect with and relate to the people and organisations around them. They are particularly interested in exploring people’s attitudes and motivations towards physical activity. Through storytelling, they hope to understand how people can become more active in different ways that have a meaningful and positive impact on people’s overall lives. 

As part of this project, People’s Voice Media worked with local Community Reporters to hold a short workshop to listen to stories from local people and identify things we can learn from them about what motivates people to be active and what gets in the way. The stories were gathered during the COVID-19 pandemic and some of the key learnings identified in the session were:

1. People who had been shielding/isolating during the pandemic may feel reluctant or anxious about leaving home – support and understanding is needed to help people work through this.
2. Winter is a particularly challenging time to ‘get out’ and exercise. Darker evenings and colder weather means that people are more likely to stay indoors.
3. Keeping active is easier when you are doing it alongside people – the social side and encouragement from others makes it a better experience.
4. The pandemic has stopped a lot of sports and exercise activities. This means that people have been used to being less active and therefore encouragement back into activity is key.
5. We are all influencers… we all have the power to encourage those around us to be more active. Trust is also important – when there is a relationship of trust, people are more likely to be positively influenced by that person and join them in different activities. This can build people’s confidence in trying new things.

The stories we looked at in the session were from the health inequalities work current taking place in Calderdale that is being led by VAC. They can all be viewed here.

Late last year we started working with Barnsley Museums to explore how Community Reporting and lived experience storytelling can support their evaluation activities, and contribute to their on-going learning and development. We wrapped-up the initial part of this work – and here is what we learned!

The group felt that the strengths of using Community Reporting as an evaluation tool are:

• it gave a platform to participants to voice their perspectives
• it gives detailed insights into people’s experiences
• it can feel less pressured/formal than other approaches to evaluation
• it can be tailored to the needs of a project

When reflecting on the weaknesses, the group felt that Community Reporting faced challenges such as:

• people finding the time to dedicate to it properly and resourcing from the organisation
• some people may be missed if they don’t feel comfortable with being filmed/recorded

However, despite some challenges in implementing the methodology, the opportunities it provides far outweighed them. For example, it provides a more engaging way of presenting learnings and information. It also allows organisations to better respond to community needs by listening to them directly. More so, it gathers meaningful evidence of impact that other methods do not. And finally, Community Reporting provides a process for understanding qualitative evaluation which helps tackle bias.

So, with all those opportunities and positives to using Community Reporting as a tool for learning, evaluation and impact evidencing, we wish our partners at Barnsley Musuems all the best as they embed it into their work!