Within the on-going COVID-19 crisis there is a danger that the most marginalised communities across Europe are left out of this conversation. It is important to us, and our movement of Community Reporters, that people who are under-resourced and who often occupy the positions of least power are involved in this dialogue. This is why we are launching an Institute of Community Reporters collective project – #COVIDConversations – to gather stories about the crisis from voices that may go unheard.

In response to requests of our partners from across Europe, we have created a space on the Community Reporter website for an online archive of everyday experiences of the life during the COVID-19 outbreak. We plan to work with these stories in the future and share the learnings in them with a wider audience. It is important that these stories are not forgotten and that the insights in them are heard and use in the future as we rebuild and change our world. It is vital that all kinds of voices are included and that the people who share and gather these stories are active actors in this moment of change within our shared history.

So, how can you get involved?

1. COMMUNITY REPORTER – CALL TO ACTION
   We are asking all of our existing Community Reporters to log into www.communityreporter.net and upload your own personal story about your experiences of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. This can be a short piece of text, a photo, an audio clip or video. When you upload them, make sure you select ‘COVID Conversations’ as the ICR Network on the drop-down menu. Click here to download a quick ‘How to upload your story’ guide.
2. UPSKILLING THE NETWORK
   We will be running an online training session for existing active Community Reporters, existing Trainers, current Social Licensees and wider Support Partners to equip them with the skills to gather stories via remotely. The session will be delivered in May (date TBC) and each attendee will then gather 5+ stories each from their own networks, with a keen focus on unheard voices. If you’ve like to take part, email us. Places are limited.
3. ONLINE STORYTELLING SESSIONS
   The People’s Voice Media team will be delivering one-to-one storytelling sessions with people online and via the phone, to gather their experiences of the crisis. These sessions are designed to include people who may otherwise be excluded, and will run on the 10th and 23rd June. We are asking our partners and members to help us find people to participate. If you know someone who is willing to share an experience and would like to speak one-to-one with our team, drop us an email.

This is our second blog in a series about how Community Reporting has been used as a tool for co-creation in the CoSIE project. In this blog post, we wanted to share with you some of our learnings from applying Community Reporting as a tool for insight gathering, and explore some of our successes and challenges during this process…

In the CoSIE project, Community Reporting as an insight tool has been applied to collate and analyse stories about topics pertinent to the co-creation processes (i.e. to better understand the problem being tackled through the co-creation process). Some of the key strengths in using Community Reporting in this way have been:

• It gathers richer qualitative data than other more traditional research approaches do and helps to better understand ‘wicked’ or complex problems.
• It can help services to better engage with groups who would otherwise not usually have their voices heard – storytelling as a medium and our peer-to-peer approach is generally seen as being accessible to most people.
• It can help to address power imbalances between services and the people who access them by providing citizens with a chance to set the agenda.
• It provides a method for working with stories so that experiential knowledge can be gleaned from them and used as an alternative form of data.

Speaking about their experience of working with Community Reporting, the pilot in the Netherlands stated that “It’s not rocket science. It’s a basic thing that, as a civil servant, we tend to have an agenda – a well-meaning agenda but an agenda nonetheless. [Community Reporting] took us away from our agenda and allowed people to make their own.” In doing so, they got a richer understanding of the issues behind why people were unemployed in their municipality than they did from statistics. This reframed how they thought about the problem, and thus influenced the interventions that the pilot is currently testing out.

In terms of some of the challenges we have encountered in using Community Reporting in the project, we found that:

• It can take more time and resource to apply than other simpler data collation techniques (i.e. surveys)
• It can be difficult for some groups to engage with due to the digital technologies involved and the barriers they present
• It is an innovative tool for data gathering and sometimes not recognised by traditional ‘powers’

Speaking about one of these barriers, the Polish pilot explains how the older people they were working with “don’t get on well with the technology… it’s really hard for them“. Despite this, what they did connect with, was the idea of belonging to a social change movement and they have used this identity to spear-head change in their area.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore how Community Reporting has been applied as tool for dialogue in the CoSIE project, and if you want to read the introductory blog in this series, you can do so here.

Over the last two-and-a-half years, People’s Voice Media has been leading a stream of work in the CoSIE project that supports public services across Europe to uses Community Reporting as a tool for co-creation. In the UK, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Finland and Sweden, we have worked with different services – from employment support to probation services – to embed storytelling and lived experience into their service design, delivery, and evaluation in meaningful ways. Over the next month or so, we are going to blog some of the key learnings from this experience here…

So, where to start? Well, firstly through looking back with hindsight at the ways we have used Community Reporting in the different public services, we can see that this application can be summarised into three key ways:

1. As a tool for insight
2. As a tool for dialogue
3. As a tool for reflection

While these three types of application are distinct, there are overlaps between them and they can be combined as the Venn diagram below details.

As an insight tool, Community Reporting broadly fits into the realms of participatory and empowerment research fields. It engages citizens, people who work in services and other stakeholders to be a part of an insight-gathering and identifying process by sharing their stories and co-curating them into concrete findings. Through this, traditional power imbalances between the researcher and the research subject are reduced.

As a tool for creating dialogue, Community Reporting aids communication by providing people with the tools to use storytelling to engage in conversations with their peers and other people beyond their peer groups. Using stories as part of Conversation of Change events stimulates dialogue between different stakeholders about a topic, issue, service etc. Community Reporter stories can also be used as communication aids to talk to decision-makers. Such practices enable different voices and understandings of the world to be explored in an equitable manner, and can help to make decision-making processes transparent.

Finally, as a tool for reflection, Community Reporting supports people to reflect on their experiences and the experiences of others. This proactive, critical reflection provides people with the space and time to more deeply understand how they and others experience the world, and thus support people to identify how public (and other) services can better support their needs.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore how Community Reporting has been applied as a tool for insight in the CoSIE project, and identify some of the strengths of this approach, and the challenges we have encountered.

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.

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.