Last year, People’s Voice Media teamed up with Genio and a team of experts within the social innovation arena to produce ‘Learning As You Scale’. This guide supports people and organisations involved in scaling social innovations to develop and embed a disposition to learn ‘as they scale’. We are now excited to be able to share this toolkit with you.

Social innovations aim to design and deliver solutions to social problems and seek to improve people’s lives and communities. They come in different shapes and sizes, including processes and practices, products and services. Such innovations usually start life as ‘pilots’ that are delivered outside of the wider system, market or environment already working to address a given socialproblem. Successful pilot innovations may then seek to ‘scale’ or ‘spread’ within or beyond their sectors, dependent on their initial results.

Learning As You Scale is not about the traditional formal post facto evaluation, rather it is about learning during a change process, system redesign or roll-out. This guide prompts social innovators to embark on the initial learning process in respect of one social innovation – and we hope that this will lead to a learning habit, becoming an essential part of the culture of an organisation or partnership leading multiple social innovations. Rooted in action research, this practical guide enables individuals and organisations working on social innovations to explore how they gather data and insights from their innovations, how they evaluate and assess these materials and how they can use these insights both within scaling plans and beyond.

Learning As You Scale focuses on supporting people working on social innovations which are scaling in complex change environments and are often addressing ‘wicked’ problems within the social sphere. This guide has been designed specifically for those involved in social innovations who are interested in involving the people for whom the innovation is designed to support within this scaling and learning process. It can be used by individuals and teams within these types of social innovations who occupy roles connected to evaluation, learning & development, and leadership, governance & strategy.

You can now download the full guide here: Learning As You Scale – Full Guide

Or download some key bitesized sections below:

1. Scaling a social innovation? Measure your impact with… the PICO framework (Dr. Gorgi Krlev)
2. Scaling a social innovation? Measure your impact with… Process Tracing (Dr. Gorgi Krlev)
3. Scaling a social innovation? Measure your impact with… Lived Experience Storytelling (Dr. Hayley Trowbridge)
4. Scaling a social innovation? Share your learning (Stephen Barnett)

Earlier this month a 2-Day training programme took place in Manchester as part of the ‘Not Another Co-Production Project’. Covering the fundamentals of Community Reporting and exploring how this method can be used as a tool for co-production the event was delivered in person at the St. Thomas Centre in Ardwick.

This is a 3-year project funded by the National Lottery that will see People’s Voice Media and Ideas Alliance work together to move co-production from a buzz word into an embedded practice across different areas in England. We want a future where policy, research and service design are informed by local people and where collaboration is the heart of how things are done. This way of working is messy, fun, challenging, but can really make a difference to those who are willing to give the time and energy to it.

The training was a mixture of presentations, individual/small group/whole group activities and discussions, reflection tasks, practical recording activities and Q&A.

As part of the day, we shared our own experiences of co-pro and here’s some of what chatted about:

• Co-production can lead to new ways of thinking and new ways of doing thing – different people’s perspectives ask us to think differently
• In larger organisations and institutions it can be hard to do things in the way you’d like to do them if you don’t have the authority to make certain decisions – sometimes the people who are advocating and practicing co-production struggle to get their bosses to see its value and share or handover their decision-making powers 
• A big part of co-production, is reflecting and critiquing – who has control, who have the power, who is setting the agenda?

Over the last few months People’s Voice Media and the Community Reporter Network have teamed up with the NHS in Greater Manchester, to gather people’s recent experiences of GP services.

We’ve gathered these stories to explore what GP services are like for people who are accessing them, looking at what is working well and what could be better. With the NHS in Greater Manchester we want to use the stories to open up a conversation across Greater Manchester about GP Services.

We have gathered 65+ experiences from residents in Manchester, Wigan, Salford, Tameside, Bolton, Rochdale, Oldham, Bury, Stockport and Trafford about how they’ve found accessing GP services during the pandemic. People have shared with us the changes they’ve experiences – such as telephone appointments or online consultations – and their perspectives on them.

For some people, the changes haven’t been so positive. For this resident, not being able to speak in-person to their GP has meant that they don’t feel they can express properly what they are feeling and they don’t feel they’ve got the healthcare that they needed. However, other people like this resident explains how new options around how to book appointments and get repeat prescriptions are real positive developments.

You can listen to all of the stories we’ve gathered here: https://communityreporter.net/experiences-gp-services and we will keep you up-to-date with any developments with these great pieces of insight. Watch this space!

Since September People’s Voice Media have been working on a project with volunteers and community members from across Manchester. In February an online evaluation session took place in which people fed back their experiences working on the project.

The project has been delivered in collaboration with Manchester Local Care Organisation and a variety of VCSE organisations from across the city. Local health development coordinators from MLCO have helped support representatives from the VCSE organisations both in and out of the training sessions. Last week HDCs and team members from MLCO came together to provide feedback on their experiences of the project, reflecting on the aims of the project. Below are the key themes and questions that emerged in the evaluation session:

To utilise the knowledge & expertise of VCSE organisations working in Manchester neighborhoods

• The people involved in the project reflected the communities that need more representation
• The range of VCSE orgs involved in the project meant a diverse range of stories emerged
• The trainings provided opportunities to build connections between Manchester VCSE’s

To train staff & volunteers as Community Reporters

• Trust & confidence levels were impacted by the amount of organisations and representatives in the training sessions
• The practical aspects of the training helped to solidify people’s learning
• People would benefit from learning how Community Reporting could be used in different contexts outside of the project

To build relationships & develop trust between communities & healthcare professionals

• The trainings offered a chance to build relationships between VCSE organisations
• The payment offered for taking part in the project strengthened links between MLCO and community organisations as people feel their contributions are valued
• Difficult to measure cause and effect in terms of developing relationships and building trust in this context

To gather, curate & share stories of people’s experiences during the pandemic to bring about positive change in local communities

• A series of films have been produced as a result of the project including voices from various communities within Manchester reflecting on their experiences of the pandemic
• Confidence levels increased in some of the people who took part in the Community Reporter training sessions
• Future potential for discussions around the content that has been created

Develop trust in public health messaging (Questions raised by MLCO)

• How could we use lived experience stories in health messaging?
• How can we adjust health messaging to reflect the complexities of people’s lives?
• How do we understand from a community perspective what matters?

The evaluation session marked the end of the project and was a great opportunity to regroup and reflect on people’s experiences. We hope the people involved in the project continue to use Community Reporting in their work in the future, and look forward to seeing how the stories gathered continue to generate conversation around the impact of the pandemic on Manchester’s communities.

Over the last year, – our staff team and Board members have been reflecting on how People Voice Media and as team members we can address systemic racism and be actively anti-racist. It is clear to us that simply not being racist is not enough.  We carefully looked at the make-up of the people who work at and lead our organisation, and the project partners we have and who is generally involved in our work – and the numbers spoke for themselves. At all levels there is an over-representation of white people involved. We recognise this needs to change and we agreed to commit at a team and leadership level to do work in this area, although we didn’t know where this work would lead us. 

Using the framework above has helped us to think about how where are we now and as the people who make the organisation where we would like to and recognised as actively anti-racist. Whilst we have never denied racism is a problem is a society, we had previously not fully acknowledged our role as an organisation in not actively and strongly enough seeking to dismantle the structures than perpetuate systemic racism and in being actively anti-racist. We have been in the zone of ‘not being racist’ and offering ‘equal opportunities’. We now see that this passivity is part of the problem and have and will continue to make moves both internally and externally to address this.

Our aim is to reach the Growth Zone and remain consistently in it. Yet our experience of becoming anti-racist is that it is not a linear journey with an end point. Parts of what we have been doing is situated in the learning zone – educating ourselves, having the uncomfortable conversations – and within the steps we have taken as individuals and as an organisation we are seeing glimpses of the growth zone – we have begun to surround ourselves with others who think and look differently than us. 

Reaching the Growth Zone doesn’t mean our work will stop. Being actively anti-racist is an on-going process. Therefore, rather than have an anti-racist policy or set of pledges that are static, we are instead going to:

• keep consistently reviewing what we are doing in this arena
• seek feedback and input from others on what we do
• be transparent about our work in this area and open ourselves up to accountability and challenge from ourselves, people in and external to our network and the general public. This blog post is the start of this. 

So, what changes have we been making and currently working on? 

• Working on including anti-racism work as a core part of our Community Reporting training and aligning anti-racism to our core purpose and values.
• Take responsibility for anti-racism in the spaces we have created (or are a part of) by actively challenging instances of racist behaviour, both conscious and unconscious, and not leaving it to others to do.
• Recognise and acknowledge the lack of diversity within our own team and seek to address this. (We’ve made a great deal of progress here at a leadership level via the Board and also in our Freelance Crew).
• Recruit people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, and other minority groups not only on projects related to their identity. (Again, hopefully you have seen some changes here already as well).
• Represent more clearly the diverse communities we work with in our communications and resources. Ensuring that we represent the people we work with in the visual content we gather, use and share. (Another area that we’ve had feedback that people have seen a different already). 
• Widening these discussions to include the Community Reporter Network, seeking critical reflections and challenge, and input into how we become actively anti-racist.

What next?

We want to be transparent and accountable for our work at becoming actively anti-racist, and so that we are not in ‘our own bubble’ we feel it’s important to share what we our doing with people. To do this we will:

• provide regular updates through blogs like this on our actions, progress, and commitment to anti-racism
• have anti-racism work as an item on our agendas at all team meetings and Board meetings
• continue to create spaces for anti-racism conversations to happen in both 

             internal and external meetings.

The feedback and input we’ve had so far at a recent Community Reporters’ catch-up has been positive and powerful, with people saying how important it is to have a place of support and solidarity for people to come together to discuss, offload, and support each other. This input has directly fed into a piece of work we are developing to support people from Black and minoritized backgrounds in co-production environments, which are indisputably very white spaces.

How can you help us?

We welcome critical reflections and challenge, as we are aware that we will mistakes on this journey. This will help us to transition from the ‘fear zone’ when you share these with us!