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

USING STORYTELLING IN CO-CREATION PROCESSES – A KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE

Online event / Tuesday 2nd June 2020 / 1pm – 2:30pm

Calling all grassroots change-makers, lived experience experts, community workers, co-creation facilitators, social action catalysers and front-line public service and health and social care professionals….

Stories are powerful tools. They can be the means by which people work out their thoughts and ideas. They can help us to make sense of our lives and the world around us. They can be a way for us to communicate and connect with others. 

As part of the CoSIE project – a scheme that is piloting co-creation approaches in different public services across Europe – storytelling has been used as tool to more actively involve citizens in service design, decision-making and evaluation. It has also supported dialogue between people and institutions and between citizens and professionals.

This participatory workshop will share the learning from this project in terms of how storytelling has been applied as a tool for co-creation in different public services, and what the benefits and challenges of this has been. Specifically, the workshop will explore:

  • Using stories for gathering insight, creating dialogue and supporting reflective practice
  • Opportunities for using storytelling in your field and what it can add to your work 
  • Barriers to working with stories and lived experience and how these can be overcome 

After the workshop, we want to package our learnings from the CoSIE into a useful format for others to access. We don’t know what this will be as yet – a toolkit, a blog or vlog series, online training activities… or all of the above – so as part of the workshop, there’ll be an opportunity for you to input your expertise and ideas into what is created. We are reaching out to our wider peer community to help us with your own knowledge to make something really valuable! 

If you wish to attend this online event, you can reserve your place here.

Instructions of how to attend this online event (including a link) will be sent out to attendees via email closer to the date. Places are limited so please only book if you 100% intend to join. 

As this is an online event, attendees will need a laptop, tablet, or smartphone with internet connection in order to participate.

ZOOM WORKS WONDERS FOR CONCRIT ONLINE MEETING

As you’ve probably already guessed, last month’s Concrit TNP meeting in Poland was cancelled due to Covid-19 restrictions. But PVM and our European partners weren’t deterred and we still met online using Zoom.

It was good to see everyone looking well and positive despite the grim circumstances and Zoom proved to be an excellent tool for collaborative online working. We were able to move the project onwards and make decisions about how to adapt to these challenging times. We all agreed that digital storytelling and criticall thinking for marginilised groups is even more important than ever.

If ever there is a time to share lived experiences it is now.

You can see Kath’s full ideas sheet from the meeting here.