Earlier this year, the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) released their 2025 Parks and Greenspaces State of the Market report. In it, they reported that 80% of councils believe parks are being disproportionately affected by budget cuts despite 90% recognising that lack of investment in these spaces will have health and social impacts. They also report a drop in the number of councils who believe the public should have free access to all parks.

With this in mind, we have writen a Policy & Practice Briefing that presents insights from lived experience stories about the role of parks and green spaces in people’s wellbeing, sharing policy and practice recommendations that local authorities can implement.

The evidence that has informed this briefing has come from Community Reporter stories from people who regularly access – or would like to access – parks, green spaces, and other public natural settings. We have looked at 29 stories gathered across various projects, as well as independently, between 2019 and 2025.

The briefing will be supported by an online Knowledge Exchange event, held on Monday 30th June 2025, 12pm to 1pm. You can register for the session using Eventbrite, by clicking here or on the button below.

This work is supported by Esmée Fairburn Foundation.

Systemic racism continues to underpin the experiences of people from Global Majority communities in the UK, yet they are not listened to. This is highlighted by contradictions between the lived experience of racialised people, and the claims of the previous government that systemic racism does not exist in this country.

With this in mind, and in partnership with the Co-Production Collective, we have writen a Policy & Practice Briefing on the lived experiences of racism in professional settings, and the way in which they are not being listened to or truly heard. This is symptomatic of predominantly white organisations, operating in predominantly white spaces, continuing to uphold the status quo by believing that simply being ‘not racist’ is enough, when they need to be actively anti-racist. 

The briefing presents insights from the often-unheard experiences of people from Global Majority communities in the workplace. Based on the 37 stories gathered from people from Global Majority communities in 2024, we found that systemic racism is prevalent in many professional spaces. Global Majority voices are routinely not listened to or heard by white peers, with racism in the form of microaggressions and tokenism creating a culture of power imbalance. Based on these insights, the briefing presents practical recommendations for employers – specifically those working in leadership or HR roles, as to how they can ensure Global Majority voices are heard and the manifestations of systemic racism are addressed in their organisation. 

The briefing will be supported by an online Knowledge Exchange event, held on Monday 24th March 2025, 12pm to 1pm. You can register for the session using Eventbrite, by clicking here or on the button below.

This work is supported by Esmée Fairburn Foundation.

People’s Voice Media and the Community Reporter Network are committed to ensuring that lived experience stories are valued and have influence. Each year we produce an impact and learning report that helps us to see the difference our work is meeting and sets out our direction of travel for the coming year.

This year’s reports shows that we are:

• Creating brave spaces that are actively anti-racist and are spaces that people can learn about, and share, lived experience
• Influencing individuals and organisations with our anti-racist, inclusive vision
• Demonstrating the importance of lived experience in a variety of sectors
• Supporting organisations to use Community Reporting in their work and change the way they do things
• Helping people to develop new skills
• Providing platforms to people whose voices are often unheard or ignored 
• Playing our role in influencing policy and practice

The EUARENAS project responds to a major European challenge – the need to strengthen legitimacy, identification and engagement within the democratic public sphere. The project investigates the ways that social movements, coupled with local reform initiatives that manifest themselves in local-level experiments, create momentum for political change that include more inclusive forms and participatory forms of governance. It nurtures active citizenship, social agendas and political life through citizen participation and democratic innovations in European cities through a range of traditional, applied, and mixed methodology research approaches.

People’s Voice Media has been leading the work package utilising foresight and future-thinking approaches as a research strand. As a tool, foresight is both a tool for understanding democratic innovations as they emerge and for engaging citizens and other actors in such innovations within the participatory and deliberative realms. EUARENAS uses mixed method approaches to foresight to investigate and hypothesize over future trends and scenarios in participatory democracies. These research activities have culminated in a Future Scenarios Report, which can be read on the EUARENAS website, and a visualisation of the EUARENAS City of the Future, which can also be viewed online. Both outputs make the recommendation that cities wanting to strive towards more equitable local democracies should:

1. Address structural barriers to participation
2. Build relationships of trust
3. Invest in formal and civic education
4. Make decisions for the long-term

We have now transformed these key learnings into policy recommendations that can be implemented at city level in order to foster legitimacy, identification and engagement within the democratic public sphere. We are excited to share these recommendations with you.

People’s Voice Media were commissioned as a learning and evaluation partner for Vision for Volunteering as they carried out the second phase of their project – which seeks to create a better future for volunteering – between April 2023 and March 2024. We followed an iterative learning structure, working collaboratively with the Vision team to make sense of the complex environment in which the Vision is operating and trying to create change. Our aim was to not only evaluate the work carried out so far, but also to create a learning strategy that the Vision team could use going forward to continuously learn as the project forges ahead. Having recently submitted our final report and strategy to the team, we have been reflecting on some of the tools we have used and how we might utilise them in order to work towards our own People’s Voice Media strategic goals.

With Vision for Volunteering, we used a combination of tools to gather data from the project itself and the wider volunteering ecosystem. These included:

• Stories of lived experience
• Ripple Effect Mapping
• Events data (spectrum lines, surveys, feedback cards, etc.)
• Statistics and KPIs from the project team

As well as analysing each data set individually, we also synthesised it under the five themes of the Vision for Volunteering project: Awareness & Appreciation, Power, Equity & Inclusion, Collaboration, and Experimentation. As the volunteering sector is complex and non-linear, and the themes are high concept, it would not make sense to use a traditional Theory of Change in order to measure the impact of the project and plan future steps. Instead, we opted for a Vector Theory of Change (VToC) in order to produce Direction of Travel maps. Directions of travel for each thematic vision were established and in each learning cycle, insights from the learning tools were plotted against the axes. The data points are then grouped together where trends emerge.  From this, in each project learning cycle, an understanding of the current state of play can be re-established. This enables the identification of adjacent possibilities within the context of the current volunteering ecosystem. These adjacent possibilities are the closest realisable next steps in how to move in the direction of travel needed to achieve the specific thematic vision. This is the compass for the strategic direction. The ensuing steps can then be followed in order to transform this into action.

This approach allows for flexibility, adjusting your plan to work with the current state of play. It also allows for the development of small steps that work towards bigger change.

As we used the VToC method for our partners, it became increasingly apparent to the People’s Voice Media team that we could benefit from this approach when working on our own strategic goals. It would give us the flexibility we need while giving us space to reflect on each learning cycle and decide on our own adjacent possibilities. Inspired by our work on this project, we will be seeking to use a VToC in our next Annual Learning Report (to be published later this year) and make it an integral part of our strategy work going forward.

We’re very excited about this development in our learning and look forward to sharing the outcomes.