Back in May, the EUARENAS project held its first Community of Practice (CoP) in-person session as part of a project meeting in Reggio Emilia. The CoP is made-up of folk from research, services, policy and communities across Europe and the group is interested in learning and developing their knowledge about how democracy works in local communities, and how citizens (in the broadest sense of the term – i.e., people who live in a place) and communities can be more involved in local democracy. As part of this session, we delivered an introductory activity that looked at the future of democracy in Europe – this blog shares with you some of the ideas from this session…

Democracy Now

When reflecting on what democracy feels like where they live and work, the CoP members noted points such as:

• Citizens feel removed from the political process – they perhaps don’t care or feel powerless to affect change 
• There was a sense that ‘European identity’ is being diminished 
• Growing complexity administration and bureaucracy causing blockages and disconnect 
• Truth and trust doesn’t feel valued 

A key question being posed, was is democracy really working? Are current structures really supporting the practice or principles of social equality – or are they unwittingly helping maintain inequalities? 

The future we’d like to see

Given that some of the points above point to a ‘crisis in democracy’, CoP members had some interesting ideas about how this could look very different. These ideas included:

• Citizens having more agency and involvement in democracy – moving to ‘deep democracy’, going beyond just voting and being involved in deliberation and decision-making 
• Having a ‘value-driven’ democracy 
• Local government with the competencies to support new ways of working with citizens and involving them in local democracy

Ideas for getting there

So, given that the CoP members would like to changes from the current situation, we spent some time thinking about how we might get there. Thinking and suggestions in this area were:

• Mainstreaming of existing practices such as participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, crowdsourced law – so that these become the new ‘status quo’
• Adopting test and learn approaches as a way that experimentation can be done and actively learned from
• Find ways of celebrating and connecting up the small changes that are taking place – this will help people see that progress is being made, even when it feels like things are changing too slow

The full results of this workshop will be combined with more detailed work done with residents of different cities across Europe to produce an insight briefing focusing on how people across Europe are currently experiencing democracy and their ideas for the future.

This will be released in Autumn 2022 – watch this space!

This week, members of the PVM team have been in Palermo, along with partners from the CONTINUE Project, to deliver training on Knowledge Exchange activities and share updates on work package progress. A representative from Gorse Hill Studios – our local partner based in Stretford, Greater Manchester – also joined us, for a week of shared learning and development.

We kicked off the week by exchanging key learnings from stakeholder interviews which partners had conducted with people in their local communities. The interviews were with a range of different people including teachers, youth workers and representatives from local government and explore their thoughts on how the COVID-19 Pandemic has impacted the lives of young people. Each partner presented the key learnings from each of the interviews, then we moved on to discussing how we could share this information with other people working in the field.

As part of the training, the group exchanged ideas for activities that could be used in the knowledge exchange event to facilitate discussion – ideas ranged from the Fishbowl technique to Focus Groups, creating safe spaces and World Café. We were then provided with a template session plan which each of us will adjust to suit the needs of the groups we’ll be working with.

Partners are now fully equipped to organise and deliver their knowledge exchange events. This stage of the project will be wrapped up by the end of September. Each partner will then write up a set of local policy briefings (using the learnings from the KE events) which will be shared in the hopes of influencing change.

A further Pan-European Knowledge Exchange event is set to take place by late November, combining the learnings from the local sessions and building further understandings – this will feed into a final Pan-European Policy briefing which is set to be released in the New Year.

The TNP took place the day after the training sessions and enabled partners to update on the progress of the project and discuss future plans.

Stay up to date with project happenings on the PVM blog and be sure to follow us on social media for more frequent updates. 

So, 2022 saw us bring back our annual Community Reporter conference for the fourth time. This time we were back to a large-ish in-person event, with online/hybrid elements and were focusing on talking about power and lived experience.

The event had a range of talks, workshops and activities that were hooked around exploring:

• Who controls the narrative? Basically who is setting the agenda in ‘lived experience storytelling’ spaces.
• Whose story do we hear? And perhaps most importantly, whose story are we not hearing and why?
• Who watches the watchmen? Are those of us who work in the co-production space (i.e. folk like us!) being critical enough of ourselves and how we may be unwittingly upholding power imbalances?

The day kicked off with some short soapbox talks from attendees who shared their own perspectives on power and lived experience. Ben shared a talk titled ‘Offering closure to your past self and others through sharing lived experiences’, Selva came and talked about real and faux co-production and Eleanor created a powerful video exploring disability and power.

From here we went to a workshop delivered by people involved in the Closed Cultures project, that asked attendees to reflect on how subtle power imbalances and control can lead to closed cultures developing… and most importantly, what role we can play in addressing this. Later in the day, a group of researchers asked us to reflect on language and power – exploring the hidden and not-so-hidden power dynamics that are at play in language and how it is used. Following this session, the ‘What is the value of co-production’ project took the stage and explored how we can create the right conditions for co-production to flourish; trust and relationships came through strong here. And finally, we wrapped up the day with what our team has been learning through the work that we do and showcasing some of the fab stuff that is happening in the spaces we work. We heard from Curators of Changes about the ‘iceberg of co-production, from BLAST Fest about their work in exploring science and technology through Black arts and culture and from Sparkle Media about their role in bringing different voices into the media.

If you missed the day, don’t worry we’ve created a folder that you can download the slides from. You can access it here. We’ve also made a folder of interesting stuff we’d love to share with you – toolkits, reports, animations and things… have a gander here.

Any more events coming?

Well, we have an online Community Reporter catch-up happening in September. You can get a FREE ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/community-reporter-network-online-meet-up-2-2022-tickets-332056749677

We run 2 online catch-ups per year for the people, groups and organisations that make-up the Community Reporter network. They are a great way for members to keep up-to-date with what is happening in the Community Reporter network, learn new stuff, share expertise, find out about opportunities they can get involved in, meet other members, network and much more. 

And if you’re not a member of the Community Reporter network… then don’t worry – you can still come along and find out more about us! See you there!

As part of England’s Co-Production Week 2022, we teamed up with Ideas Alliance, the partners on the Not Another Co-Production project and co-producers from across the country to deliver our first ‘Not Another Co-Production Festival‘. This little blog will give you a glimpse of some of the day’s shenanigans.

So, what happened then?

Well, as someone, somewhere once said “if you build it, they’ll come”… and that certainly came true at the Science and Industry Museum earlier this week. Lead by the fab crew at Ideas Alliance the vision for a ‘learning festival’ that felt different to conventional events and was most of all, fun – came to life. Around 200 people came through the doors to take part in silent discos, interactive performances, listening spaces, workshops, talks, chat shows, games, public living rooms and much more. The aim of the day was to bring people together to have conversations about co-production, make connections and explore the challenges within this space. On the day, topics explored included faux production (you know the kind – when weak versions of consultations are packaged as ‘coproduction’ because it’s the ‘in thing’ to do), why are co-production spaces so white? (and what can we do to change this), how to be more human (have a gander at the Camerados principles for a helping hand in this) and much more.

Sounds great – what’s next?

Well, first the team needs to regroup a little and do something thinking over what worked in the space we created and what didn’t – or what cold be better next time. Then we will be starting the next year of the project in the West Midlands. Over the Summer, we’ll be looking at what this looks like and releasing some more details by late Summer/early Autumn about how you can get involved. We will be in touch with more info soon!

Greater Manchester NHS supported by Aqua, and People’s Voice Media have been developing approaches to supporting people with Long Covid.

To help inform this work, our team have been working with people experiencing Long Covid as part of a series of Community Reporting sessions in which people have shared what it is like to live with the illness. We believe that stories are great ways of learning from one another and can be powerful ways of communicating. The stories people have shared with us has shed light on how Long Covid impacts on people’s lives and what support would help people through it.

So, what did we learn from the stories?

Some of the key insights in the stories were:

• Compassionate care – focussing on how people are listened to, validated, treated in more human ways, showing empathy. In short, clinicians and professionals in the system need to be more human and less ‘process focussed’ 
• It’s not one size fits all – the lists of symptoms are different for different people. People’s experiences are unique. It’s also a changing thing; there are good days and bad days – it’s a bit like snakes and ladders 
• Emotional, psychological support is good when it happens, but inconsistent for some, hard to access, and there are long waiting times. In this respect, peer support is really important. Some people were offered it this and some were not – it felt inconsistent. Also, sometimes peer support has become ‘NHSified’ 
• Support is fragmented – no one is treating or welcoming the whole person, each symptom is treated in isolation.

This short film summarises the key points from across a larger set of stories and concludes with some recommendations for the health and social care sector for supporting people with Long Covid.