For a number of years, Johan Flyckt has been using people’s stories to impact on the way in which social housing services are provided in Sweden. Using Community Reporting methodologies, Johan has been using the lived experiences of people to impact on decision makers around important issues. And it is this impact that the Our Voices project seeks to build on.

Opening the fourth transnational partnership meeting for the Our Voices project, Johan reflected on the barriers he had encountered in getting people’s voices to be heard – an issue that is pertinent to this project. He discussed how he had used real voices and stories in reports and films to help influence the way that things are done in his work place. This gave the Our Voices partnership much food for thought and discussion… setting the collaborative learning tone of the meeting.

Over the last six months, the Our Voices team, led by People Voice Media, has designed a 5-day training-the-trainer course on story curation. This meeting provided partners with a good opportunity to discuss the first draft of this curriculum and offer feedback, suggestions and adaptations based on their expertise and cultural understandings. Based on this feedback, the training programme is currently being finalized ready for its launch in September, where in the hosting city of Berlin it will be piloted with a pan-European group of trainers. More news about the training course and the project – coming soon!

As part of the CoSIE project, Valènciactiva is working with the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) to co-design and pilot a new business creation and development scheme with a variety of stakeholders. To kick-start this process, People’s Voice Media trained staff members from Valènciactiva and UPV in Community Reporting for Insight Methods which were used as part of their first co-creation workshop.

Within the workshop a range of stakeholders – from NGOs to members of regional government, business mentors to unemployed people – used storytelling to share their experiences of supporting people back into employment or how they have been supported to get back into employment themselves. With these stories, the stakeholders used the experiences of people in the room to generate ideas for the business creation and development programme. Core ideas that emerged were the need for empathy from service providers and to better connect existing provision to meet the needs of users.

Following this workshop, the Valènciactiva and UPV staff worked with People’s Voice Media to curate the stories and ideas from the co-creation workshop into a synthesis of findings and emergent suggestions for the co-design phase of the pilot. Watch the behind-the-scenes video below to find out more!

Stories can be the means by which people work out their thoughts and ideas: they can be an exploration, a search for meaning or an offering up to others. People’s stories about their experiences provide useful insights into what is happening in their lives and communities. Stories like these are a valuable source of qualitative data that can be used to inform the findings of research projects, provide intricate understandings of issues pertinent to communities, be catalysts of change in service design, advise local and national agendas and policies, and much more.

Through exploring curation methodologies, the Our Voices project seeks to enhance the ways in which people and communities can use their stories to create positive change. This book is a presentation of the project’s initial findings into how people, groups, communities and organisations across Europe are currently collecting, curating and creating impact with stories and how this can be used to develop a pan-European curriculum on story curation. Download the full publication by clicking on the link below.

As part of the Greater Manchester Public Service Reform (GMPSR), the strategy for supporting the most at-need communities has been the adopted of place-based interventions (PBI). This way of working has seen the development of neighbourhood hubs and teams, aimed at supporting residents with multiple needs.

People’s Voice Media’s and our Greater Manchester network have been working with specific PBI teams to gather insight into the lives of residents in the area. These stories have formed the basis of a curated report, which you download below.

Supporting Transitions is a project that uses video storytelling methods and Community Reporting practices to support families with disabled children to enhance personalisation in transition processes. The key idea was to put family voice at the heart of transition, whether than be through using video clips to enhance Education Healthcare plans or using family stories to give insight to different social professionals about what life is like in that family. The project was run in partnership with AQuA and Bridgewater NHS.

The initial pilot of the project involved co-producing with parents of disabled children a training programme that enabled them to learn about how to:

• communicate their family’s story and their child’s needs and uniqueness on video
• understand and use responsible storytelling practices
• use basic video recording practices on smartphones and tablets
• share videos safely and securely online with a range of education, social and healthcare professional

To do this we used core elements of our Community Reporting for Storytelling and Insight programmes and adapted them for a new context and usage.

Following the programme and using the learning from it, the families involved co-designed online learning tools (interactive presentations, video tutorials and handouts) that would support other families to get involved in the project. The results, impact and learning from this proejct was presented at the ISQua 2017 International Conference as part of a panel of projects supported by the Health Foundation.

You can find out more about the impact that this work has had on one family who participated by watching the short case study video below!