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.

Between May and October 2023, People’s Voice Media has been delivering a series of Ripple Effect Mapping Workshops and Storytelling Sessions with members of the Camerados Public Living Room movement. 

Camerados is a social movement – which really just means that there are lots and lots of people (from Baltimore to Blackpool) who think being a bit more human is a good idea. The movement started in 2015 and the main thing you’ll see them doing is opening Public Living Rooms in different communities across the world.

During November, we spent time curating the insights from the stories and Ripple Effect Mapping sessions to create a set of initial findings which we will build upon in the next round of story gathering and Ripple Effect Mapping. The findings reveal the positive impacts that Public Living Rooms have on the lives of the people who use them.

1. For some people, Public Living Rooms have a transformative or healing effect, simply through offering a space where they can be themselves and verbalise what’s on their mind.
2. For people who have spent time if various systems and services, Public Living Rooms provide an antidote to that. The lack of social stigma and the emphasis on not trying to fix people and just being alongside each other makes them a low-pressure environment for people used to the stresses and pressures of services.
3. Public Living Rooms have demonstratively brought communities together simply through allowing people to meet each other. They grow spaces and initiatives by creating a nice space to be in.

In all, this demonstrates that people benefit from spaces – like Public Living Rooms – that are a bit more human and that allow them to be human too.

We will continue working with Camerados over the coming months to further these findings.

This year, the People’s Voice Media team has worked incredibly hard on our Annual Learning Report, trying to encapsulate the learnings from our social change work during the 2022/23 period, but also how we have acted upon the learnings from the previous year’s report. In its pages you’ll find out more about our impact, our learning and development, and the future of People’s Voice Media – as well as how this work aligns to our strategic goals.

We’re proud to launch it here today although, in truth, we’ve already begun working on several of the learnings found within. If you have any feedback or questions about the report, feel free to get in touch at enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk.

Please note: We’ll be recording and releasing an audio summary of the report in the coming weeks.