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.

After the events of May 2020 which saw George Floyd murdered by a police officer in Minnesota, the People’s Voice Media team were prompted to examine our own complicity in systemic racism. At the time we were a predominantly ‘white’ organisation, across all of our layers and we could not pretend that we did not have a road to travel.

However, we did not want to make empty gestures that would be quickly forgotten with no lasting impact. Instead, we wanted to have a long-term anti-racism strategy that would enable ourselves and others to hold us accountable. We wanted this to not only align with, but also inform, our overall strategy and vision for the organisation.

This has been a long process over almost three years, beginning with the setting up of a subgroup of our Board to work on the topic, and evolving through education, conversations, and active listening into what will be our Anti-Racism Vision.

Our Vision – which will be published on our website in the very near future – will not be an end point, rather a beginning. It lays out the next two years as a series of milestones for our team and Board members, our organisation, and the sectors in which we work. It recognises that becoming actively anti-racist is an on-going commitment with no final end point. As such, the Vision will be a living document. At the end of two years we expect to have more to add, more to do, keeping anti-racism at the centre of what we do, and at the heart of our goal to create a socially just work.

There is work to do and it is work we are already in the process of undertaking. During the past few years, our team and Board members have:

• Undertaken individual learning on racism as a systemic issue
• Developed a shared understanding that racism is a systemic issue and an issue we need to address on individual and organisational levels

As an organisation we have:

• Established initial relationships with partners who are led by people from communities with lived experience of racism
• Diversified the people who are part of People’s Voice Media in terms of race through changes to our recruitment practices

Within our sectors we have:

• Initiated conversations about systemic racism within those sectors
• Enhanced the racial diversity at events and workshops we host or are a part of

Our Anti Racism Vision will, as mentioned, be published in the near future. For now, if you have any comments, questions or feedback regarding our anti racism work, please do contact us at enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk.

In 2021, People’s Voice Media embarked on the CONTINUE Project, which sought to support young people experiencing social exclusion to tackle the specific challenges of post-COVID times in terms of staying connected and integrated into European communities. The project was delivered by a consortium of 8 NGOs from different European countries, experienced in youth education and community- based activities. The work involved storytelling, social action projects, policy development, knowledge exchanges, an outreach campaign and the creation of an online platform, and was co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

The UK strand of the project, which People’s Voice Media has been responsible for, saw us partner with Gorse Hill Studios in Trafford, Greater Manchester, to examine the ways in which their young people had been affected by the pandemic, and co-produce ideas for ways in which they might be supported going forward.

Over the two years, the project saw us gather stories, host Conversation of Change and knowledge exchange events, produce insight reports, and recommendations for policy and practice. We’re proud that these recommendations have been taken forward by Gorse Hill to begin discussions with Trafford Council on ways in which they can work together to support local youth, and we’re proud of the project’s reach across Europe.

We’ll be following up on the lasting impact of the project over the next 12 months and will report in upcoming annual learning reports so watch this space.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities across communities in the UK and beyond. As part of the CONTINUE Project, (a pan-European consortium of eight NGOs, co-funded by the European Union’s Erasmus+ programme) People’s Voice Media has published a policy and practice briefing, which details specifically how young people living in Trafford, Greater Manchester have been adversely affected by the global crisis.

Young people in the area are experiencing challenges with their health and wellbeing, disengagement with education and are being further disadvantaged by poverty and disability due to lack of local support. As the briefing demonstrates, at present there is significant pressure on local support provision and this is leading to young people not being able to access the support they need. Furthermore, young people’s voices (particularly those facing varying degrees of marginalisation) are not regularly present in the political or decision-making sphere on a local level.

The evidence that has contributed to this briefing includes lived experiences of young people from Trafford, interviews with local policy- and decision-makers, learnings from the application of social actions in the local area, and a knowledge exchange sessions attended by a range of local actors and stakeholders. This briefing presents specific recommendations for policy and practice intended to have long-term positive effects on young people and relates to policy areas around mental health, political engagement, and safe spaces. They demonstrate what can support young people and their communities during COVID-19 recovery, while simultaneously increasing their socio-political engagement in local governance. And although the recommendations have been written with Trafford in mind, they have the potential to be rolled out and applied at a national level.

The CONTINUE Project has also developed a pan-European policy and practice briefing with recommendations at the European level, which can be downloaded here.