Through storytelling, People’s Voice Media continues to champion social justice, foster inclusive communities, and drive systemic change across sectors.

Since 2020, we have implemented a comprehensive learning, impact and evaluation process that captures the voices of those engaged with our work. This includes Community Reporters, Community Reporter trainers, residents, service professionals, policymakers and other stakeholders involved in our activities. As an organisation that understands the power of stories and lived experience, our approach has always and continues to centre storytelling and human insight. Over the years we have developed our approach to learning, impact measurement and the evaluation of our work – enhancing how we drive forward our organization, deliver our strategic goals and are cognizant of the challenges we face and where changes to our approach are necessary. 

This year’s learning, impact and evaluation report covers the period of April 2024 – March 2025. It presents the methods and structure we’ve used to support our learning and synthesises the results. It helps us to learn about our work as an organisation and supports how we implement our current strategy. It has been designed to:

1. Identify and understand the impact of our work
2. Monitor and evaluate our progress towards our strategic goals 
3. Support and enhance decision-making at strategic and operational levels

Our process has been developed iteratively over several years, bringing in elements of projects, processes, and methodologies as we’ve learned and grown. We have sought to put stories and human insight at the core – demonstrating what we advocate and using Community Reporting as a key method in this process.  We have combined Community Reporting with other approaches that help us to understand the complexities of the change we are trying to make. 

If you would like to find out more, you can download and read the report using the buttons below. We’re proud of this work and are excited to share it with you.

This work has been funded by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

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.