From May to October 2024, we partnered with Macmillan Cancer Support and NHS Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICB to train health workers and volunteers in Community Reporting. The aim was to improve access to cancer care services, particularly for South Asian and Roma/Traveller communities.

At the final session, we explored key themes from the stories collected. The insights were clear:

• Better communication is needed, using multiple languages and accessible formats.
• Misinformation about cancer must be addressed to build trust and awareness.

Though the training has ended, the work continues. Macmillan and NHS Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICB will implement these learnings by:

• Establishing Community Champion Advocate schemes.
• Embedding Community Reporting into future engagement.

One participant summed up the impact perfectly:
“I’ve learned to zip this (pointing to her mouth) and open these (pointing to her ears).”

This project is a step forward in embedding lived experience into service development. By training professionals to listen, share, and act on real patient experiences, we are driving social change in cancer care access. With Macmillan and NHS ICB committed to using Community Reporting long-term, this is just the beginning of a patient-led approach to service improvement.

Last summer, People’s Voice Media partnered with Black Country Integrated Care System (ICS), the VCSE network, and Wolverhampton Voluntary and Community Action (WCVA) to launch the REND Project. Over 18 months, we trained 51 Community Reporters and gathered 38 powerful stories exploring healthcare access across the Black Country.

The project aimed to:

• Build capacity within the VCSE sector to support research and engagement.
• Capture qualitative insights into people’s lived experiences of healthcare.
• Develop a community-led intelligence library to inform decision-making.

Through Community Reporting, we uncovered key challenges that needed addressing, including:

• Improving communication and training for healthcare staff, particularly around cultural competence and accessibility.
• Addressing digital inequities to ensure fairer access to online healthcare services.
• Embedding person-centred approaches that actively listen to and act on community feedback.

These findings were shared at a workshop, where local people and decision-makers came together to explore practical solutions. The stories will now inform ongoing improvements within Black Country ICS, ensuring that community voices remain central to service design.

This project is a step towards making healthcare more accessible, inclusive, and responsive to the people it serves. We were privileged to hear these stories—and even more excited to see how they drive real change.

In May this year we held our 6th Annual Community Reporter Conference in the form of a ‘hackathon’. A hackathon is a space were people can come together to explore a problem and co-create solutions. The event brought together a group of 56 experts to explore the question “How can we make lived experience storytelling practice more accessible and inclusive?”. Experts included people with lived experience of some of the issues being discussed, researchers, creative practitioners and storytellers, public engagement professionals, evaluators and workers in the third and public sectors.

The event focused specifically on how storytelling could be:

• accessible for people who do not use spoken word
• inclusive for people who are neurodivergent
• actively anti-racist

Through a series of creative and participatory activities, the attendees worked together to explore the barriers and identify solutions that were summarised in a short report. Here’s a short video overview of the day…

You can also listen to an audio executive summary of the learning report here. The event was funded and support by NCRM.

People’s Voice Media and Think Local Act Personal (TLAP), in partnership with Halton Borough Council, launched a Community Reporting project to gather stories from people with learning disabilities and Autistic individuals in Halton. The project aimed to explore how these individuals experience local services, highlighting what works, what doesn’t, and what can be improved. By listening to their lived experiences, the initiative sought to understand the elements that contribute to a meaningful life and identify ways local services can better support people. 

Central to the project was a commitment to accessibility and inclusivity. People’s Voice Media was supported by members of the National Co-production Advisory Group (NCAG) to facilitated storytelling sessions focusing on people’s experience of services. Over several months, we gathered stories from a range of people and ran some online workshops to explore the key insights in the stories with the storytellers. At these sessions we developed some recommendations based on the lived experiences gathered and explore how this learning could support the implementation of the One Halton Co-Production Charter. 

The results of this work can be viewed in this short video:

People’s Voice Media and the Community Reporter Network are committed to ensuring that lived experience stories are valued and have influence. Each year we produce an impact and learning report that helps us to see the difference our work is meeting and sets out our direction of travel for the coming year.

This year’s reports shows that we are:

• Creating brave spaces that are actively anti-racist and are spaces that people can learn about, and share, lived experience
• Influencing individuals and organisations with our anti-racist, inclusive vision
• Demonstrating the importance of lived experience in a variety of sectors
• Supporting organisations to use Community Reporting in their work and change the way they do things
• Helping people to develop new skills
• Providing platforms to people whose voices are often unheard or ignored 
• Playing our role in influencing policy and practice