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.

Over the last few months, PVM 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.

PVM trained the project partners in Community Reporter methodologies so that they (along with PVM) could host story gathering workshops followed by story curation sessions with marginalised young people in order to garner insights from their lived experience stories. These insights have now been collated and put together in a series of reports, one for each partner.

The findings of these reports are currently being discussed in a series of Conversation of Change events in each of the partner countries, and the findings from these will be taken forward into the next stages of the project, as well as an online pan-European Conversation of Change event, which you can register for here.

In the meantime, you can download each of the English language reports as a PDF using the following links:

• UK insight report by PVM
• German insight report by CRN
• Lithuanian insight report by Active Youth
• Hungarian insight report by Artemisszió
• Italian insight report by Per Esempio
• Danish insight report by Crossing Borders
• Portuguese insight report by FAJDP

About the CONTINUE Project

Connecting European Youth through Storytelling

CONTINUE will support young people suffering from social exclusion to tackle the specific challenges of post-COVID times in terms of staying connected and integrated into European communities. 

CONTINUE will directly involve young people with migrant and other marginal backgrounds in the project activities in order to enhance the interaction between individuals, their communities and the pan-European levels. .

CONTINUE will be realised by a Consortium of 8 NGOs working with marginal youth groups, experienced in youth education, community-based activities, policy recommendations, working with an extended network of organisations from different sectors.

We Are With You provides addiction recovery services in the South West of England. People’s Voice Media have been working with Manchester Metropolitan University on the service’s Social Impact Bond (SIB) evaluation, using Community Reporting methodologies to gather rich, qualitative understandings of the both the lives and experience of those who access and work in the service. These stories provide insights into people’s worlds and how they relate to the service, as well as helping to illustrate the findings from other evaluation activities, provide stimuli for on-going learning and development and involve people involved with the service in meaningful and transparent ways in the evaluation process. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the work on the project had to be suspended or was conducted remotely. However, as restrictions eased in latter 2021, we conducted more in-person story gathering activities, working directly with people accessing addiction recovery support services. Through their stories, these people have raised several key findings around accessing addiction recovery services in Cornwall including:

• Isolation – Isolation is often part of addiction, but it makes the recovery process much more difficult. The COVID-19 pandemic has made isolation worse for many (although for others it has made little difference). Isolation has no place in recovery and more care needs to be taken that people are not isolated at this stage.

• Lived experience – Lived experience is highly valued by those accessing recovery services and there is a general point of view that support workers with lived experience of addiction and recovery provide the best service. Possibly there could be more done to assist people who use recovery services to volunteer and then work with them, if that is the path they wish to follow. 

• Imbalanced services – While We Are With You is praised in the stories gathered, other services are not. This results in We Are With You doing a lot of the ‘heavy lifting’ in the local area and picking up work that should be handled by other services (e.g. contacting relatives to let them know their loved ones are in hospital). Some of the services accessed by people also fail to offer a person-centred approach, resulting in a lack of empathy in services which is traumatic to those who use them.

All of these findings will help to involve people in a meaningful way during the evaluation process, but at People’s Voice Media, we were particularly gratified to see such importance placed on lived experience by people accessing recovery services and we have a more detailed feature article on this on the Community Reporter website.

Longford Park in Stretford, Greater Manchester, is the largest municipal park in Trafford. Dating back to 1857, when it formed the Rylands estate, it became a public park in the early 20th century and is home to many heritage features. It is currently the focus of a Stage 1 heritage project looking at who currently uses Longford Park (and who doesn’t), how it is currently used and why, how it could be used in the future, and other audience development topics.

As part of this wider project, People’s Voice Media worked with City of Trees to use Community Reporting as a tool for gathering the stories of people who live and/or work in Trafford about how they use (or, indeed, don’t use) green spaces. The stories have highlighted that Longford Park is a well-loved park by those who use it, but that there is room for improvement and that perhaps more could be done to attract newcomers. On the basis of the stories gathered for this project, we made the following findings:

• Improvements are needed for both infrastructure and facilities: This includes ensuring flooding issues are permanently resolved, carparks are resurfaced with potholes filled in, providing better toilet facilities, increasing the lighting capacity and adding more bins. This is investment in the long-term future of the park and could make it more attractive as a visitor destination.

• More could be made of the park’s many spaces: While people generally like the park’s flexible spaces and amenities, people would like to see more made of this. Regular public events would attract visitors, and could also raise funds for the park. Amenities such as a pump track and/or expanded play area would attract young people who currently go to other parks to use these.

• Longford Park’s status as a natural beauty spot could be bolstered: Many people visit Longford Park to enjoy being in nature. However, people feel more could be done to allow others to see the value in this. The gardens could be tended to more, with more flowerbeds and colour, while other areas could be rewilded. These spaces would, overall, need less maintenance, thus improving the ecosystem of the park while reducing costs.

These findings have come straight from the stories gathered as part of the project, raised by the people who do (and don’t) use the park. A playlist of story extracts and a full selection of the stories gathered can be found on the Community Reporter website, while a feature article gives some further insight.