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.

Since May 2023, People’s Voice Media has been in its second year as the learning partner for Camerados, helping them to uncover the impact of their Public Living Rooms (including what is working well and what isn’t) through a blend of lived experience storytelling and Ripple Effect Mapping.

Ripple Effect Mapping is an evaluation tool that we are using more and more frequently at People’s Voice Media. It is a participatory impact evaluation technique, originating in community development work, and the approach captures ‘ripples’ of impact that are hard to measure by traditional methods – including potential impacts that haven’t been fully realised yet. The Ripple Effect Maps were produced in a participatory online workshop environments where groups were asked to reflect on the direct and indirect impacts of Public Living Rooms that they have seen and/or organised. They then mapped these on paper as ‘change journeys’ (i.e., A led to B that led to C etc.) creating a ‘chain reaction’ from the Public Living Room launch. Different connecting lines were used to differentiate known and potential impacts, while colour coding distinguished individual, organisational, and societal impacts. Following this, they presented the map and findings to the other participants at the sessions.

People’s Voice Media then analysed the maps and presentations, synthesising the findings to highlight commonalities (and anomalies), and make a set of key learnings, some of which we can share below:

• Public Living Rooms are having positive impacts on individuals. Staff at organisations have noticed that folk visiting Public Living Rooms regularly are seeing social, mental, and physical benefits, improving people’s lives on an individual level.
• Individual impacts can have long-term, slower moving impacts on organisations and wider society. Ripple Effect Maps indicated impacts that are happening now, or are beginning to take shape, within organisations and wider communities. These are often knock-on effects from individual impacts and show that as more and more people are positively impacted by attending Public Living Rooms, these positive effects ‘snowball’. The learning here is simple: the more Public Living Rooms there are, the more positive changes in communities there can be.
• Ripple Effect Mapping should be adopted on a regular (e.g. annual) basis to continue evaluating the impact Public Living Rooms are having. This will allow Camerados to engage in continuous learning, as well as seeing the progress of potential impacts.

If you are interested in Ripple Effect Mapping and its potential uses, email enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk and we’d be happy to have a chat.