Over the last few months, PVM has been working with a consortium of European partners on the CONTINUE Project. Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, the project has set out to gather the stories of young people across Europe, specifically relating to their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

PVM trained the project partners in Community Reporter methodologies so that they (along with PVM) could host story gathering workshops followed by story curation sessions with marginalised young people in order to garner insights from their lived experience stories. These insights have now been collated and put together in a series of reports, one for each partner.

The findings of these reports are currently being discussed in a series of Conversation of Change events in each of the partner countries, and the findings from these will be taken forward into the next stages of the project, as well as an online pan-European Conversation of Change event, which you can register for here.

In the meantime, you can download each of the English language reports as a PDF using the following links:

• UK insight report by PVM
• German insight report by CRN
• Lithuanian insight report by Active Youth
• Hungarian insight report by Artemisszió
• Italian insight report by Per Esempio
• Danish insight report by Crossing Borders
• Portuguese insight report by FAJDP

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.

The Wigan Deal is an informal agreement between the council and everyone who lives or works here to work together to create a better borough. You can find out more about it here: https://www.wigan.gov.uk/Council/The-Deal/The-Deal.aspx

To better understand residents’ experiences of The Deal, People’s Voice Media and the Community Reporter network are hosting a series of storytelling sessions. In these storytelling sessions you will:

• Have the opportunity to share your experiences of The Deal
• Record your experience as a video or audio story
• Listen to other people’s experiences of The Deal 
• Determine what we have learned from the stories we’ve shared and heard 

We will share the results of these sessions with you later in the year.

How do I get involved?

You can choose to attend one of the following workshops:

• Workshop 1: 2pm – 4pm, Monday 21^st February 2022, Wigan Library, Wigan Life Centre, The Wiend, Wigan, WN1 1NH. REGISTER HERE.
• Workshop 2: 4:00pm – 5:30pm, Tuesday 22^nd February 2022, Online via Zoom. REGISTER HERE.
• Workshop 3: 2pm – 4pm, Friday 25^th February, Education Room at Leigh Town Hall, Market Street, Leigh, WN7 1DY. REGISTER HERE.

You can sign-up for the workshops on the links above, or get in touch with Hayley (who’ll be facilitating the sessions) on hayley@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk Registration will stay open until 2:30pm on 17^th February. 

Refreshments and travel expenses up to £10.00 will be provided for the in-person workshops, and 3 financially supported places are available across the three workshops (see below). 

Why are you running them and why should I take part?

These sessions are part of the EUARENAS project that is looking at how democracy works in different towns and cities across Europe. You can find out more about the project here: https://www.euarenas.eu

By taking part in the storytelling sessions, you will be contributing to the research activities of this project. The learning from the project will be shared in a range of ways including blog posts, research publications, policy briefings and practical toolkits to support communities and institutions to work together to create better futures. 

Financially Support Places

We have 1 financially supported place available per workshop that will be allocated on a first-come, first-allocated basis. The financial support is up to a maximum of £60.00 per person. This can be used to cover:

• Other expenses than travel such as childcare costs, internet costs etc. that you incur through attending the workshops. To claim this, you’ll need to send us an expenses form and receipts. 
• Other support costs such as a PA to support you to attend. To claim this, you’ll need to send us an expenses form and receipt OR ask your support to invoice us directly. 
• Contribution fee. To claim this, you’ll need to send us an invoice and be responsible for your own tax and insurance as a self-employed person. 

About People’s Voice Media 

People’s Voice Media is a social charity who have been working with people since 1995 to create bottom-up social change rooted in people’s lived experiences of the world. Our approach – Community Reporting – uses digital storytelling to help people to share their experiences, connect them with others and create new ways of thinking and doing. You can find out more about us here: https://peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk  

The first newsletter for the Continue E + project is available to read now!

The newsletter includes an introduction to the project, as well as an overview of the partner organisations and their experiences with delivering community reporting training workshops with young people in Europe and the UK. If you would like to find out more about the Continue project, why not take a look through the newsletter. You can also visit the project website here.

Follow the link below to download a copy of the newsletter:

The media is both a window into, and a shaper of the ideologies and behaviours of society. Through it, we can catch glimpses of society’s future trajectories. 

Working with actors from the social, political and research spheres as part of the EUARENAS project, we have conducted a snapshot analysis of contemporary media discourses from across Europe. These insights have provided us with an understanding of current issues within society and we have used these to begin hypothesising about the future of our democracies. 

From this initial work, we would like to pose three core questions that we feel are relevant to policy makers, researchers and civil society actors working in the domain of deliberative and participatory democracies: 

1. How do we mobilise people to be a part of creating the change they want to see and move from talk to action?
2. How do inequalities and structural issues impact on how our democracies work and who is included in them?
3. How do we work with differing priorities between different people, organisations and countries in ways that make useful progress on issues?

A short insight briefing titled ‘Future challenges and opportunities for democracy across Europe: An initial exploration of signals and drivers of change’ from this preliminary work on the project has been produced. In 2022, we will be unpicking these questions further as part of a conference in Italy… watch this space for further details.

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.