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:

The CONTINUE Project is continuing apace and the partners across Europe have recently completed a series of interviews with stakeholders, both local and pan-European.

The stakeholder groups were made up of decision-makers and policy-makers whose roles include and interest in or effect on young people e.g. local politicians, educators, health and social care workers, youth workers etc. The interviews were designed to get feedback from stakeholders on the project’s findings so far, as well as garner their insights on what they perceive to be the issues affecting young people in the wake of the pandemic.

Interestingly, and gratifyingly, the insights of the stakeholders largely align with the project’s recent findings. You can read the local synthesis reports here, and the pan-European synthesis report here. Both reports are in note form as they are being used to plan our series of knowledge exchange events across Europe.

The UK’s knowledge exchange will take place at Gorse Hill Studios on Wednesday 21st September 2022 at 4.30pm. Anyone can attend, from young people to stakeholders and members of the community. You’ll discuss the findings of the project so far and your discussions will inform the policy recommendations that we will be putting forward in the next stage of the project. You can register for the event here.

You may also wish to save the date for our pan-European knowledge exchange, which will be held online on Monday 14th November 2022. Time and registration link to follow.

Over the past three years, we’ve been working with community and learning organisations across Europe as part of the CONCRIT project to explore critical thinking, storytelling and digital literacy in informal learning environments. As part of this work, we’ve produce a toolkit that provides a learning path to support trainers/informal educators to embed media literacies and digital skills in their training and community learning programmes.

The core modules in this toolkit are:

• Introduction To Media Literacy and Digital Storytelling in Civic Education
• Developing Digital Skills and Using Digital Tools
• Identifying Specific Media Literacies and Digital Storytelling Needs in Different Communities
• Safe and Responsible Practice

These four easy-to-use modules give accessible explanations and practical tasks to guide you through the different facets of media literacy and digital storytelling. Take a look and see how you can use the activities in your own work!