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.

We’ve been working on how to present our social impact and learnings for a few years now. Our first big attempt for the year 2019/20 felt all wrong and too numbers-based for an organisation that works with lived experience storytelling. Last year’s report was a lot better after we piloted using reflective storytelling as our main impact-measurement tool and we felt it better reflected People’s Voice Media and the work we do.

This year, for the 2021/22 report, we have built on this even further after realising that it wasn’t really a social impact report at all, but more an annual report of our learnings as an organisation. We still look at impact through reflective storytelling, but we use this as a tool to identify learnings and work out how to put these into action.

Today we are releasing our Annual Learning Report 2021/22 into the world, but we have already begun pulling out learnings and creating a plan of action in order to put them into practice. This is something we are reviewing every quarter and, as such, we hope to make this a working document that’s useful to not only People’s Voice Media, but also our partners and others who work with lived experience storytelling.

So, without further ado, here is our Annual Learning Report… Let us know what you think!

For those who prefer to listen to an audio summary of the report, you can do so here:

The CONTINUE Project is continuing apace and the partners across Europe have recently completed a series of interviews with stakeholders, both local and pan-European.

The stakeholder groups were made up of decision-makers and policy-makers whose roles include and interest in or effect on young people e.g. local politicians, educators, health and social care workers, youth workers etc. The interviews were designed to get feedback from stakeholders on the project’s findings so far, as well as garner their insights on what they perceive to be the issues affecting young people in the wake of the pandemic.

Interestingly, and gratifyingly, the insights of the stakeholders largely align with the project’s recent findings. You can read the local synthesis reports here, and the pan-European synthesis report here. Both reports are in note form as they are being used to plan our series of knowledge exchange events across Europe.

The UK’s knowledge exchange will take place at Gorse Hill Studios on Wednesday 21st September 2022 at 4.30pm. Anyone can attend, from young people to stakeholders and members of the community. You’ll discuss the findings of the project so far and your discussions will inform the policy recommendations that we will be putting forward in the next stage of the project. You can register for the event here.

You may also wish to save the date for our pan-European knowledge exchange, which will be held online on Monday 14th November 2022. Time and registration link to follow.

With the ongoing rise of populist politics across Europe, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the divisions exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and social media, European democracy matters more than ever. With people feeling increasingly distanced from democratic processes, the EUARENAS project responds to a major European challenge – the need to strengthen legitimacy, identification and engagement with democracy within our cities.

As part of this Horizon 2020 project, People’s Voice Media has been conducting research in the UK and Ireland – Wigan and Galway to be precise – to find out more about two case studies about how citizens can participate in local decision-making. We have written feature article over on the Community Reporter website to share with you what we learned from a small number of citizens about their experiences of the case studies. Later in the project, we will be releasing case study reports that share the insights from a range of research strands… but for now, you can read the key insights from people’s stories by clicking the button below.

Over the past year People’s Voice Media has been working with a consortium of European partners on the CONTINUE Project. Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, the project has set out to gather the stories of young people across Europe, specifically relating to their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Initially, PVM trained the project partners in Community Reporter methodologies so that they (along with us) could host story gathering workshops followed by story curation sessions with marginalised young people in our respective localities in order to garner insights from their lived experience stories. These insights were collated and put together in a series of reports, one for each partner in Germany, Lithuania, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Denmark and the UK. The individual insight reports (in English) can be downloaded here.

These reports were used as the backbone of a series of Conversation of Change events across Europe, one for each partner organisation. At these events, facilitated by the young people themselves, young people and project partners met with stakeholders, decision-makers and policy-makers to discuss the insights from the lived experience stories and begin to co-create ideas for social actions that would feed into the next stages of the project. The stories and events uncovered that there were three main areas in which European youth felt most heavily affected by the pandemic:

1. Health and wellbeing – high levels of anxiety, poor mental health, reduction in physical health;
2. Education and careers – disengagement with education, damaged career prospects;
3. Social issues and inequalities – exacerbation of existing inequalities and social issues.

These three themes were discussed in-depth in the Pan-European Conversation of Change event, held online in April, at which stakeholders, decision-makers, and policy-makers working at the European level worked together to develop further insights and ideas for social actions. These insights have been used to create a pan-European insight report, which can be downloaded here, and a short film highlighting some of the lived experience stories told by the young people across the continent.

The project is now moving on to its next stages, in which the young people co-create social actions in each of the respective partner countries, while partners speak to local and European level decision-makers, policy-makers and stakeholders to develop knowledge exchange events and policy recommendations. Watch this space.