LOCKDOWN WORKING: ANALYSIS, ANALYSIS, AND MORE ANALYSIS

Lockdown working has presented a fair few challenges for PVM. We’re a largely face-to-face organisation: delivering training, attending project meetings, performing dialogue interviews… It’s all done in person.

As a result, we’ve had to rethink a lot of things. Where we’ve been able to, things are being done remotely. Workshops, knowledge exchanges and meetings have been moved online and we’ve all become experts in a range of video conferencing software and online collaboration tools. Where online hasn’t been a possibility projects have been paused with their deadlines extended, to be picked up again once lockdown measures have eased.

This has triggered a huge rethink in our workflow priorities. Projects that, just weeks ago, were massive priorities with imminent milestones have now shuffled to the back of the queue while work that has been put off in favour of more pressing deadlines (you know how it can be…) has suddenly found itself in the foreground.

For Sarah, this meant spending May taking a deep dive into our curation reports for the CoSIE project to form one of our project deliverables. The deliverable itself isn’t due for a good few months yet, but getting these analyses drafted now means that later this year the team isn’t juggling writing several thousand words, editing stories into a film, and trying to catch up with projects that have been on-hold.

So what are the curation reports?

The curation reports form a key part of the Community Reporting methodology. It involves looking at the stories gathered, pulling out the key themes that span them, and writing them up into an analysis that summarises our findings.

For the CoSIE project, this means looking at the stories gathered in each of the pilot projects. For Sarah, this meant examining the stories from Houten and Nieuwegein (both in The Netherlands), and Hungary, resulting in around 11,000 words of analysis. The insights gleaned were sometimes surprising. For instance, the Hungarian pilot which is all about rediscovering home economics and self-sustainability in disadvantaged communities, demonstrated that many of the participants show that there is a large demand for homemade produce, so much so that some participants are looking at turning their home enterprises into small businesses. Some stories, meanwhile, demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of co-creation – sometimes showing it can only work when everyone involved is wholeheartedly invested.

While lockdown has forced us to reassess our entire working practice, it has perhaps given us opportunity to take time over things we would have ordinarily put back, and given us the time and space to properly examine them without distractions.

That being said, we can’t wait to be back organising workshops and conferences, and delivering training again.

COVID-19: CAMERAS IN THE CLASSROOM IN GREECE – EUROSPECTIVES

Greece is one of the few countries that effectively managed to shut down the spread of COVID-19 before it really had a chance to take hold, and they are seen as one of the success stories of the pandemic. However, out of their lockdown measures, an unforeseen issue is arising, surrounding the use of digital tools in education settings.

One of our Eurospectives partners, Stephanos Cherouvis of Elliogermaniki Agogi has written a fascinating blog over on the Eurospectives site to shed some light on the ongoing saga.

INTERVIEW WITH FILMMAKER GLENDA ROME ABOUT THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF ‘RETURN TO THE CLOSET?’

At the Eurospectives meeting in Athens in March we were lucky enough to have filmmaker Glenda Rome on board.

At the meeting, she screened a film she had facilitated with a group of older people from the LGBT community in Glasgow, called Return To the Closet?. The film was made last year and has had a positive impact, with health and social care providers now using the film as an equality and diversity training tool for their staff.

Since the meeting, Kath interviewed Glenda about the film (via Zoom due to COVID-19 restrictions) and what strategies were put in place to ensure social impact was achieved. You can watch the interview below.

CONCRIT WEBSITE GOES LIVE

People’s Voice Media are excited to be part of CONCRIT, a European project that aims to work towards a socially cohesive Europe, by designing a training programme in ‘Community Narration For Critical Thinking’. This training programme will use digital storytelling and critical thinking to help to develop; self-confident, fully informed and educated citizens.

The project will work with adult educators, volunteers and community workers focused on civic education to develop an effective training path for members of marginalised communities to access, to learn and to develop ways to build resilient communities and to de-construct discriminatory stereotypes.

It’s been great to see the project moving forward despite the lockdown, with the launch of the new website and wonderfully bright flyers. Check the website out here