This year, the People’s Voice Media team has worked incredibly hard on our Annual Learning Report, trying to encapsulate the learnings from our social change work during the 2022/23 period, but also how we have acted upon the learnings from the previous year’s report. In its pages you’ll find out more about our impact, our learning and development, and the future of People’s Voice Media – as well as how this work aligns to our strategic goals.

We’re proud to launch it here today although, in truth, we’ve already begun working on several of the learnings found within. If you have any feedback or questions about the report, feel free to get in touch at enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk.

Please note: We’ll be recording and releasing an audio summary of the report in the coming weeks.

The  report to the COVID Inquiry has now been completed. It has been sent to the COVID Inquiry team and you can access the report here. Below you have a summary of some of the key points and links to the conversations that PVM had with people, to give you a preview of what the report includes. 

Links to extracts from 6 of the 22 participants

Keymn explains why having an understanding of the value of lived and living experience is training that healthcare professionals must have.

Miro explains why society has to re-think and understand disability differently.

Amanda tells us why COVID information was not fully accessible for Deaf people and what could have been done differently. 

Andy explains to Isaac the reasons for involving people with lived and living experiences.

Hameed discusses both the positive and negative aspects of the pandemic.

Baroness Brinton talks about health and social care problems that were highlighted during the pandemic.

Links to full conversations with all participants

The PVM process starts with individuals narrating their experiences, facts and feelings. We did this by talking to 22 people as part of the joint work with DRUK, so that the lived experiences of Deaf and Disabled people could be input to the COVID Inquiry.

There was one point in the process, where the information given by individuals seemed overwhelming. This was partly because everything felt important and relevant, but also because the task of determining key themes seemed a difficult or limiting process.  For example, when it felt as though every point people made was important, it then seemed like we might be trivialising the topic if we tried to distil it to a few main aspects.

However, the PVM process means that meaning emerges, although this doesn’t happen by magic.  We listen and highlight what we think is important. We might colour code, group together or count how often topics are talked about. We also consider how frequently a contributor might return to talk about a lived experience, as an indication of how strongly they feel about the issue.

For the COVID Inquiry work, we began with some open questions to allow people to give their lived and living experiences in a broad way and in their own words. As the work progressed, and by the time we had recorded 10 narratives, we were able to include some more focussed questions, e.g. Other people have said _____, did you find this was the same for you or what was your experience of this? There was definitely the need to balance the open questions against more focussed ones, because we did not want to lead the participants down a specific route, but we were aware that being able to give the COVID Inquiry team specific details would be important.

In the report we’ve included direct quotations from many of the people who shared their lived experiences. Where necessary, we’ve also offered explanations, based on the conversations and online sense making workshops we held. This is because we wanted to clarify for the Inquiry why particular aspects were different or difficult for Deaf and Disabled people. The key points from the report are:

·  There was confusing and frightening information from national government and local authorities to Deaf and Disabled people.

·  COVID both highlighted and exacerbated existing systemic problems and Inequalities (including racism, ageism and ableism) within statutory services

·  Even though there is legislation, little understanding exists about Deaf and Disabled people’s needs.The report is comprehensive and has had an emotional impact on some readers. We hope it will give people’s voices meaning so that the COVID Inquiry can make recommendations that will support Deaf and Disabled people, together with their carers. As Keymn Whervin stated in the foreword to the report: “The Inquiry must ensure that people affected by COVID have their voices heard, particularly in respect of how we co-produce health and social care”.

Isaac Samuels

In a world of increasing uncertainty and complexity, foresight and future thinking techniques can act as a key tool in the innovation of policy development, bringing citizens and decision-makers together to define solutions about our shared futures (Fox, 2020). As part of EUARENAS we’ve been working with social media signals to explore the future of democracy across Europe.

Social media provides a window into current debates, social issues and topics pertinent to communities. Whilst the presentation of such content is not necessarily a reflection of society, and like traditional media representations is more of a refracted view on current trends rather than a mirror image, it is still a valuable source material for understanding society. Social media accounts, particularly those associated with civil society and social movements can provide us with signs of what issues and debates are pertinent to people (as opposed to institutions) and simultaneously offer a glimpse of emerging trends in the social sphere. Such content can be useful for hypothesising over the future of our world.   

The results of this work are still being analysed and will feed into an insight briefing that we will launch later in the year about the future of democracy across Europe… however, we’ve turned the methodology we used for this work into a handy toolkit to help researchers, practitioners and policymakers work with social media content to explore the future of topics pertinent to their worlds.

This toolkit uses social media posts combined with elements of the Delphi method and policy stress testing approaches to explore future trends in society and the policy environments needed for potential future scenarios. The toolkit is underpinned by theoretical and conceptual framings of foresight practices. However, they are presented in a manner than enables them to be practically applied and implemented as a means of engaging experts from across policy, practice and research in conversations about the future.  Included within the toolkit are step-by-step instructions that outline how the research tasks can be implemented, alongside templates and tips. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities across communities in the UK and beyond. As part of the CONTINUE Project, (a pan-European consortium of eight NGOs, co-funded by the European Union’s Erasmus+ programme) People’s Voice Media has published a policy and practice briefing, which details specifically how young people living in Trafford, Greater Manchester have been adversely affected by the global crisis.

Young people in the area are experiencing challenges with their health and wellbeing, disengagement with education and are being further disadvantaged by poverty and disability due to lack of local support. As the briefing demonstrates, at present there is significant pressure on local support provision and this is leading to young people not being able to access the support they need. Furthermore, young people’s voices (particularly those facing varying degrees of marginalisation) are not regularly present in the political or decision-making sphere on a local level.

The evidence that has contributed to this briefing includes lived experiences of young people from Trafford, interviews with local policy- and decision-makers, learnings from the application of social actions in the local area, and a knowledge exchange sessions attended by a range of local actors and stakeholders. This briefing presents specific recommendations for policy and practice intended to have long-term positive effects on young people and relates to policy areas around mental health, political engagement, and safe spaces. They demonstrate what can support young people and their communities during COVID-19 recovery, while simultaneously increasing their socio-political engagement in local governance. And although the recommendations have been written with Trafford in mind, they have the potential to be rolled out and applied at a national level.

The CONTINUE Project has also developed a pan-European policy and practice briefing with recommendations at the European level, which can be downloaded here.

We are thrilled to announce that the findings of the ‘What is the value of co-production?’ project are now live.

You can:

• Watch a video summary of the findings from our Community Reporting (7 mins)
• Read the overview report (10 pages, 15 mins)
• Read the full report (80 pages, a couple of hours but so worth it!)
• Watch the YouTube playlist of fantastic extracts from all of the storytellers

None of these amazing resources would have been possible without all of the people who shared their stories with us. We are so grateful for their time and the insights that have shaped this important bit of research.

And there’s more…

There were also some other strands to this research that you might be interested in. All the details are on this webpage: What is the value of co-production?

This includes:

• An overview video of whole project
• Interactive summary PDF of whole project
  • A screen reader friendly version – as a Word document and as a PDF document.
  • An audio version – as a MP4 file
  • Versions of the Interactive summary in Braille, EPUB, MOBI – via a Google Drive folder
• As well as the Community Reporting findings, this also includes the results of the Gobby survey, a rapid critical review and learning from pilot projects.

We hope that this resources and research findings are useful to you – and please do share widely.

And look out for more coming soon – there will be the launch of a resource library for co-production and much more besides! Watch this space!