Last week members of the PVM team ventured out to Valladolid to take part in a series of training workshops as part of the Narrative of Impact Project.

We were joined by project partners from across Europe and together we tested a series of storytelling activities, each of which had been adapted in order to be used as a way of measuring impact. These activities, alongside a series of video guides, will combine to form a toolkit – which will provide instructions on how to implement storytelling as a tool for measuring impact.

A huge thank you goes out to INTRAS Foundation (Spain) for hosting the training and the rest of the partners for your efforts in presenting and testing the activities: Comparative Research Network (Germany), Coordinamento delle Organizzazioni per il Servizio Volontario (Italy) and SNDE (Poland).

Stay tuned for more updates!

The second newsletter to be published as part of the CONTINUE project is available now!

See below for the full PDF which contains updates on the local Conversation of Change events and the youth training in Vilnius. If you’d like to view the stories which have been gathered so far as part of the project, you can do so on the ICR website here.

The European COC event took place on Thursday the 7th of April and saw partners and young people come together online to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on young people’s lives on a pan-European scale. Stay tuned to our blog for updates on the learning that emerged from this event and future project activities – you can also visit the CONTINUE Project website here for more information.

Last year, People’s Voice Media teamed up with Genio and a team of experts within the social innovation arena to produce ‘Learning As You Scale’. This guide supports people and organisations involved in scaling social innovations to develop and embed a disposition to learn ‘as they scale’. We are now excited to be able to share this toolkit with you.

Social innovations aim to design and deliver solutions to social problems and seek to improve people’s lives and communities. They come in different shapes and sizes, including processes and practices, products and services. Such innovations usually start life as ‘pilots’ that are delivered outside of the wider system, market or environment already working to address a given socialproblem. Successful pilot innovations may then seek to ‘scale’ or ‘spread’ within or beyond their sectors, dependent on their initial results.

Learning As You Scale is not about the traditional formal post facto evaluation, rather it is about learning during a change process, system redesign or roll-out. This guide prompts social innovators to embark on the initial learning process in respect of one social innovation – and we hope that this will lead to a learning habit, becoming an essential part of the culture of an organisation or partnership leading multiple social innovations. Rooted in action research, this practical guide enables individuals and organisations working on social innovations to explore how they gather data and insights from their innovations, how they evaluate and assess these materials and how they can use these insights both within scaling plans and beyond.

Learning As You Scale focuses on supporting people working on social innovations which are scaling in complex change environments and are often addressing ‘wicked’ problems within the social sphere. This guide has been designed specifically for those involved in social innovations who are interested in involving the people for whom the innovation is designed to support within this scaling and learning process. It can be used by individuals and teams within these types of social innovations who occupy roles connected to evaluation, learning & development, and leadership, governance & strategy.

You can now download the full guide here: Learning As You Scale – Full Guide

Or download some key bitesized sections below:

1. Scaling a social innovation? Measure your impact with… the PICO framework (Dr. Gorgi Krlev)
2. Scaling a social innovation? Measure your impact with… Process Tracing (Dr. Gorgi Krlev)
3. Scaling a social innovation? Measure your impact with… Lived Experience Storytelling (Dr. Hayley Trowbridge)
4. Scaling a social innovation? Share your learning (Stephen Barnett)

Over the last few months People’s Voice Media and the Community Reporter Network have teamed up with the NHS in Greater Manchester, to gather people’s recent experiences of GP services.

We’ve gathered these stories to explore what GP services are like for people who are accessing them, looking at what is working well and what could be better. With the NHS in Greater Manchester we want to use the stories to open up a conversation across Greater Manchester about GP Services.

We have gathered 65+ experiences from residents in Manchester, Wigan, Salford, Tameside, Bolton, Rochdale, Oldham, Bury, Stockport and Trafford about how they’ve found accessing GP services during the pandemic. People have shared with us the changes they’ve experiences – such as telephone appointments or online consultations – and their perspectives on them.

For some people, the changes haven’t been so positive. For this resident, not being able to speak in-person to their GP has meant that they don’t feel they can express properly what they are feeling and they don’t feel they’ve got the healthcare that they needed. However, other people like this resident explains how new options around how to book appointments and get repeat prescriptions are real positive developments.

You can listen to all of the stories we’ve gathered here: https://communityreporter.net/experiences-gp-services and we will keep you up-to-date with any developments with these great pieces of insight. Watch this space!

Over the last few months, PVM has been working with a consortium of European partners on the CONTINUE Project. Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, the project has set out to gather the stories of young people across Europe, specifically relating to their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

PVM trained the project partners in Community Reporter methodologies so that they (along with PVM) could host story gathering workshops followed by story curation sessions with marginalised young people in order to garner insights from their lived experience stories. These insights have now been collated and put together in a series of reports, one for each partner.

The findings of these reports are currently being discussed in a series of Conversation of Change events in each of the partner countries, and the findings from these will be taken forward into the next stages of the project, as well as an online pan-European Conversation of Change event, which you can register for here.

In the meantime, you can download each of the English language reports as a PDF using the following links:

• UK insight report by PVM
• German insight report by CRN
• Lithuanian insight report by Active Youth
• Hungarian insight report by Artemisszió
• Italian insight report by Per Esempio
• Danish insight report by Crossing Borders
• Portuguese insight report by FAJDP

About the CONTINUE Project

Connecting European Youth through Storytelling

CONTINUE will support young people suffering from social exclusion to tackle the specific challenges of post-COVID times in terms of staying connected and integrated into European communities. 

CONTINUE will directly involve young people with migrant and other marginal backgrounds in the project activities in order to enhance the interaction between individuals, their communities and the pan-European levels. .

CONTINUE will be realised by a Consortium of 8 NGOs working with marginal youth groups, experienced in youth education, community-based activities, policy recommendations, working with an extended network of organisations from different sectors.