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!

Over the course of this year, our team have been working with municipalities across Europe connected to the EUARENAS project to engage citizens in talking about their experiences of democracy in the present day and exploring their visions for the future. And we are made-up to be sharing an insight briefing based on these activities with you!

This briefing provides an overview of the key learning from a series of storytelling and future thinking workshops that took place in Gdańsk, Poland, Vōru, Estonia and Reggio Emilia, Italy. The insights are based on 33 citizen stories from these areas.

It highlights key challenges in present day European democracies such as the lack of engagement of specific demographics including young people and migrant communities, and how the potential of technology to democratise decision-making and support citizen participation is not fully being realised. Future visions of democracy include bringing voices on the margins into the mainstream, and creating more human connections between people in positions of power and the communities they serve. To achieve this, education, collaboration and pro-active approaches to achieving equity are needed.  Click the button below to access the briefing.

We’ve been working on how to present our social impact and learnings for a few years now. Our first big attempt for the year 2019/20 felt all wrong and too numbers-based for an organisation that works with lived experience storytelling. Last year’s report was a lot better after we piloted using reflective storytelling as our main impact-measurement tool and we felt it better reflected People’s Voice Media and the work we do.

This year, for the 2021/22 report, we have built on this even further after realising that it wasn’t really a social impact report at all, but more an annual report of our learnings as an organisation. We still look at impact through reflective storytelling, but we use this as a tool to identify learnings and work out how to put these into action.

Today we are releasing our Annual Learning Report 2021/22 into the world, but we have already begun pulling out learnings and creating a plan of action in order to put them into practice. This is something we are reviewing every quarter and, as such, we hope to make this a working document that’s useful to not only People’s Voice Media, but also our partners and others who work with lived experience storytelling.

So, without further ado, here is our Annual Learning Report… Let us know what you think!

For those who prefer to listen to an audio summary of the report, you can do so here: