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.

In late October, we sent a Debbie and Alice – a youth worker and a young person respectively – from Gorse Hill Studios, Greater Manchester, to Copenhagen, Denmark for a training session hosted by our CONTINUE project partners, Crossing Borders.

The training was for one of the final stages of the CONTINUE project: the Reach Out Campaign. This is designed so that the young people who have co-created the project so far can disseminate their findings and begin to pave the way for the changes the project will be recommending.

The workshops delivered essential training on how to go viral by Alex Sabour, founder and CEO of Gorilla, and how to make short form content by TikTok creator, Tom Hyland. In the next stages, Crossing Borders will be producing guidelines for the Reach Out campaign and Debbie and Alice – along with their counterparts across Europe – will be training their peers and delivering their campaigns… We can’t wait!

Also upcoming in December will be our published policy and practice briefings, co-created by everyone who has participated in CONTINUE – including in our recent pan-European knowledge exchange event. Watch this space.

Earlier this year, Manchester Metropolitan University’s (MMU) Policy Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU) were contracted to evaluate the Kirklees Better Outcomes Partnership (KBOP) and Greater Manchester Better Outcomes Partnership (GMBOP) programmes. As part of this evaluation, they partnered with People’s Voice Media, who have used the Community Reporting methodology to allow people who access aspects of KBOP and GMBOP’s support to share their experiences of the programme. These stories provided insights into current practice and how services might be improved and, where relevant, the insights were mapped to outcomes in a Theory of Change produced with PERU for both KBOP (Fig. 1) and GMBOB (Fig. 2).

KBOP

KBOP was launched in September 2019, commissioned by Kirklees Council. The service is for people at risk of homelessness. They take a person-centred approach, tailoring their support to individuals who access their services, which offer support across four main areas: housing, health and wellbeing, education and employment, and support with domestic violence.

The stories gathered from people who use KBOP’s services focused on the areas of mental health, education and employment, and the importance of the person-centred approach. They show that the service is achieving many of its aims and that its person-centred approach has been warmly received. In fact, several storytellers say there is nothing that needs to be done to improve the service. In which case, the main recommendation for KBOP going forward would be to keep providing its service without stagnating – keep doing what works but be open to changes to allow it to meet more outcomes.

GMBOP

GMBOP is a social enterprise set up to co-produce and deliver the Greater Manchester Youth Homelessness Prevention Programme. This is a 4-year programme targeting young homeless people in Greater Manchester. It is referred to locally as ‘Pathfinder’.

Some key points from across the stories are:

• The young people’s experiences of the service has been positive both in terms of their interactions with the professionals working in the service and the impact it has had on their lives
• When compared to other similar services, Pathfinder is seen as being more suitable for the young people due to (a) the person-centred approach and (b) how it helps them navigate challenges to accessing different forms of support
• The young people are reassured by the support they are receiving and suggest that it will be key preventing a return to homelessness

We have produced our findings for this project in full in a series of reports, and there is also a feature article on the Community Reporter website that goes into detail around the benefits of the person-centred approach of both KBOP and GMBOP.