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.

People’s Voice Media’s has joined forces with Stockport Council to unearth the relationship between poverty and work. Working with the neighbourhood development team, we have equipped them with the skills to be Community Reporter Trainers and Curators, and supported them to recruit and skill-up local people as Community Reporters.

As part of the project, the Reporters gathered stories about people’s experiences of work and poverty and worked with the team to curate the stories into a set of findings published in a report. These findings were then used by People’s Voice Media in a Conversation of Change workshop to generate ideas for tackling some of the issues. The ideas generated in this session are being developed into a pilot project that we are supporting via our co-creation practices. You can hear more about this project by watching the case study video below.

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!