WORKING WITH LIVED EXPERIENCE IN CO-CREATION ACTIVITIES – TOOLKIT LAUNCH

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.

WHAT MOTIVATES US TO KEEP ACTIVE?

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.

WORKING WITH COMMUNITY REPORTING

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!

CO-PRO STORIES

The Co-Production Collective wanted to explore people’s lived experiences of co-production within health and social care research. Working with People’s Voice Media, they used Community Reporting – a pan-European storytelling movement that supports people to use digital technologies to tell their own stories – to capture a series of dialogue interviews with people who identified as ‘co-producers’. These co-producers come from different sectors, work on different projects, and participate in different ways in co-production.

The key findings that emerged from this piece of work are:

  • Co-production should be approached as a practice governed by a set of values, rather than an exact science or process.
  • Co-production can bring real value to research projects and be key to ensuring that services are more effective and better meet the needs of the people who access them.
  • Co-production can be challenging but with support and encouragement, embracing continual and shared learning and by creating spaces for co-producers to connect, barriers can be overcome.

USING STORYTELLING AS AN EVALUATION TOOL

We are currently working with Barnsley Museums to explore how Community Reporting and lived experience storytelling can support their evaluation activities, and contribute to an their on-going learning and development. As part of this project, a small team from across Barnsley Museums are being trained as Community Reporters and Trainers, and are experimenting with ways that this method can be used to assess the impact of and gather insights into their work. This training is covering a wide range of areas such as storytelling techniques and responsible storytelling practices, media recording skills, story analysis methods, how to package findings as different types of media products, facilitation approaches and how to run knowledge exchange sessions.

We are delivering the training as an applied project in which the Barnsley Museums team are undertaking a bit of insight and development work that they are using to test out their new skills. Over the last few months, part of the team have been busy gathering and analysing stories about staff wellbeing during the pandemic and the rest of the team have been exploring the learning so far from an anti-racism book club they have set-up. The team are currently learning media-making skills such as video editing and graphic design, so that they can package learning from stories different audiences.

Over the next few weeks, the project will be looking at how the insights from the stories can be used to inform practice at Barnsley Museums and beyond, and how Community Reporting can be embedded into the wider evaluation practices of the organisation. More news coming soon!