In November, the Our Voices team made their way to Spain, to participate in a transnational partnership meeting. With the intellectual outputs – the curriculum, the toolkit and the resource bank – ready to be finalised, now was the time for the partnership to start thinking about the impact they can make with these products and turn their focus to dissemination and sustainability.

As part of the meeting, the team also participated in a radio workshop ran by INTRAS, Radio Atlántida. This is a pioneering activity started by INTRAS aimed at improving people’s communication skills “on air” (i.e. reading articles and books, film festivals shows, radio slots) and provide different and innovative solutions to empower people with mental health issues. Partners were all interviewed about what they think about the development of the project.

The next step for the project will be the piloting of the Digital Curation Training Programme in each partner’s context. Each partner will implement aspects of the Our Voices methodology via training programmes and workshop in order to explore to what extent this intellectual output can be adapted to different target groups. Also, during the next few months, relevant stakeholders in higher education, health sector, user-run organizations, informal trainer providers and research/policy institutes will be participating in webinars with the project team. We will ask them to give feedback on the outputs created in terms of their future usages and accreditation of the curriculum.

Following this, the main focus of the project will be on the multiplier events that are set to take place in the UK and Germany. Full details of these events will be available soon, including how you can attend!

When looking at the lives of young people in Finnish society, it is important to view them through a lens that takes into account the multifaceted nature of marginalisation and inclusion. As part of the CoSIE project, undergraduates from Turku University of Applied Sciences have been trained as Community Reporters and using an insight storytelling methodology they have gathered stories of other young people who are encountering a range of challenges in their lives. This insight has been used as the basis of a short report on youth marginalisation.

To access these young people and hear about their lives, the Community Reporters used their personal contacts and went out onto the streets of Turku. This enabled them to engage with young people who are less likely to be engaged with formal services, and through this began to uncover some of the issues that these young people are facing.

What the stories suggest is that having a purpose in life helps young people to create a positive sense of identity, which supports their overall wellbeing. This focus and sense of self helps young people to tackle the difficulties they face. However, as this insight report will detail, equating purpose to ‘having a job’ and linking this to ‘improved wellbeing’ is too simple a correlation to make. The key is that the work or purpose must be something that is fulfilling for the young person. Find out more about this work by downloading the full report below.

Working with AQuA, People’s Voice Media are about to start piloting the use of storytelling and story curation processes in enhancing person-centred care in health care settings. As part of this pilot, the team are embedding innovative and creative elements related to storytelling as part of a wider person-centred care programme for therapy staff working within the NHS. During this programme, workshops will be held that will enable staff to gather patient stories, analyse them to ascertain their key findings and produce a plan as to how they can share this learning with their wider team. Following the workshops, PVM will work with AQuA to produce a short film that highlights the key findings from this work.

The techniques being adopted in the pilot have been designed as part of the Our Voices project which has designed a pan-European and multi-medium approach to story curation. Working with this methodology and its tools such as knowledge mobilisation strategies, the UK partner and project lead – People’s Voice Media – are seeking to unlock the hidden insights in stories to help create better health care services for the future.

Rachel Bryers – Person Centred Care Lead at AQuA – says “gathering patient’s stories can be the first step in recognising that people with lived experience are often best placed to advise us on how we can deliver our services in a way that makes a positive difference to their lives. This programme focuses on understanding what matters to the patient and gave clinicians time and opportunity to reflect on how decisions are made within the hospital setting”. By experimenting with storytelling and the sharing of patient stories the pilot will offer therapy staff a new tool to drive forward quality improvement in the NHS.

Watch this space to see how the pilot goes!

The Our Voices project aims to curate and mobilize stories of different people and communities in order to create important dialogues with local and European policy makers. Co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, the project has developed a digital curator training programme that was launched in Berlin earlier this month.

The programme aims to support participants to develop knowledge and techniques on digital story curation and explore how these skills, expertise and understandings can be used in communities to support people to have their voices heard by decision makers. As part of the programme, participants will explore topics such as what is story curation, how to source and analyze stories, how to package and use them to create influence and what ethical issues need to be considered when curating stories.

The participants who took part in this programme will now redeliver key elements of what they have learned. Working with people and communities in the settings in which they work, the participants will share their new skills with them and support them to connect their stories with decision-makers. These pan-European pilot activities will test out a new way of working with the knowledge of experience and bridge the divide between citizens and decision makers. More on how this all works out, soon!

This Digital Curator Toolkit, produced as part of the Our Voices project, aims to support people to use the knowledge in stories of lived experience to create positive change and impact within their communities. It covers the same topics as the Our Voices Digital Curator Training Programme. Ideally, it should be used in tandem with this training to support you to utilise the knowledge and skills from the training to deliver story curation activities in community and informal learning settings. However, it can also be used independently by professionals working in a range of fields including community development, digital storytelling, and education

Within the context of the Internet and the digital age, the term ‘content curation’ is broadly used to describe the process for gathering, organising and presenting information in relation to a specific subject. Based on this understanding, the Our Voices approach to Story Curation is concerned with:

1. Sourcing stories via various digital storytelling methods and story banks
2. Curating stories by analysing their content and packaging this analysis into digital outputs
3. Mobilising stories and curated digital outputs by connecting them decision-makers who are in a position to create positive change for communities

This toolkit is structured in the same way as the process outlined above and in each section of the toolkit there is information on the subject matter to enable you to develop your digital story curation skills. At the end of each section, there is a guide for facilitators and adapted resources and activities that will support you to deliver digital story curation training activities in informal learning environments and/or community settings. Specifically, this guide focuses on making story curation accessible for learners with low levels of literacy and academic ability (including those with learning disabilities).

The book concludes with some additional resources you might find useful when delivering curation activities and to support your continued professional development in this field.  Download it below.