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.

The CONTINUE project will be presenting not one but two Conversation of Change events during the first quarter of 2022. Find out all of the details – and how to register – right here.

Young People in a Post-COVID World / Friday 4th February 2022 / 3:30pm to 6pm / Gorse Hill Studios

Join us for a conversation on how the pandemic has affected young people in Greater Manchester and what can be done to address these issues.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a difficult time for everyone, in particular marginalised young people who have seen their world turned upside down and have struggled to stay connected and integrated. Over the past few months, People’s Voice Media and Gorse Hill Studios have been working together as part of CONTINUE to gather the stories of young people from Greater Manchester who have lived through these unprecedented times.

The young people have co-led the story gathering and curation workshops and are now ready to share their findings with members of the local community at this Coversation of Change event. The event will be co-facilitated by the young people themselves and People’s Voice Media, with an aim to use their stories as stimuli for a dialogue about what civic action can be taken locally to address issues and ideas identified in them. 

It will take place at Gorse Hill Studios on Friday 4th February, 3:30pm until 6pm and is aimed at young people, local community leaders, members of the community and those who work in local government, health and social care, education sectors and beyond.

At the moment, the event is planned as an in-person event, with all COVID-safe measures in place. However, should any restrictions in place at the time make it unlikely/impossible that the event be held in-person, we will move to an online space.

Connecting Youth Through Storytelling / Thursday 24th March 2022 / 1pm to 3.30pm / Zoom

Join us for an online Conversation of Change event that will create a pan-European dialogue on the experience of youth during the pandemic.

Over the past few months, a pan-European consortium of NGOs have been working together on the CONTINUE project to gather the stories of young people from the UK, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Denmark, Lithuania and Portugal who have lived through the unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic

The young people have co-led the story gathering and curation workshops and are now ready to share their findings with members of the European community at this online Coversation of Change event. The event will be facilitated by Hayley Trowbridge from People’s Voice Media and aims to open up a conversation between young people and decision-makers from across Europe about how COVID-19 has impacted the lives of young people, what is different across the nations and what are the commonalities?

The Conversation of Change event will take place on Zoom on Thursday 24th March, 1pm – 3.30pm GMT / 2pm – 4.30pm CET, and is aimed at young people, community leaders, members of the various European communities, those who work in European, national and local government, health and social care, education sectors, NGOs and beyond.

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.

Co-Engage (an Erasmus+ project) was a cross sectoral project addressing the intersection of the key competence of Lifelong Learning through its methodology and partnership. By exploring the diversity of approaches of co-creation such as entrepreneurship-building, active citizenship, environmental quality, social inclusion, digital literacy, local policies, formal and non-formal education etc.

One of our key deliverables for the project was an e-book of co-creation best practices from across Europe but, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided as a consortium to produce two e-books, with one focussing on co-creation practices that emerged from lockdowns across the continent.

The e-book’s are now available to download using the below links.

Citizens as Co-Designer: Practices on how to engage citizens in community building

COVID Responses: Citizens as actors in a global crisis

At the end of August the Co-Engage project will come to an end and last week saw out its final meeting, hosted by our Polish partners in Warsaw. It was a somewhat sad end to the project for PVM as we were unable to travel for one last in-person meet-up and, instead, had to settle for dialling in on Zoom.

As we move towards the final reporting stage, we also look forward to the publication of the project’s e-book, which we will link to on this blog as soon as it’s available.