Interserve is committed to developing and evaluating more personalised ways of working with service users in order to: promote positive life choices; tackle root causes of lifestyle problems; and to build personal capacity and resilience. As part of the Cosie Project – a pan-European scheme looking at the co-creation of public services – Interserve has piloted new ways of co-designing more personalised probation services. Within the pilot process, one of the co-creation tools adopted has been Community Reporting which has been used to gather insight stories from staff and service user on their perspectives of probation services.

Key learning has emerged from these stories. For example, the experiences of service users highlighted many of the things that they valued about the service such as the opportunity to engage in peer mentoring, as well as shedding light onto areas that could be improved such as support provision for low risk offenders. The staff stories focused on people’s motivations for working within the sector with many explaining how the desire to help others was a key factor for them entering this career. However, the stories also brought up issues such as changes within the service that were preventing them from doing the job to the standard they would like.

This toolkit looks at these stories and the insights within them through the lens of personalisation, exploring what can be deciphered from the stories about how probation services can better meet the needs of the individuals involved. The overarching message from this is that personalisation is not something that can be delivered by staff to service users in a linear fashion. Rather what must be established is a working culture of personalisation – for both staff and users – that permeates all aspects of service delivery. Through examining what the contributing factors of this culture could be and by asking probing questions to its reader, this publication seeks to support professionals working in probation to understand how they can enhance personalisation their roles.

Working with communities in Germany, Hungary, Italy and the United Kingdom, the VOICITYS project and People’s Voice Media trained residents in specific neighbourhoods as Community Reporters who have used these skills to tell, understand and share their own stories on topics and issues pertinent to diversity where they live. This report provides an overview of this methodology and its implementation within the project, the findings from the stories gathered, and pan-European reflections on emergent trends across the dataset.  Download the full report below.

When looking at the lives of young people in Finnish society, it is important to view them through a lens that takes into account the multifaceted nature of marginalisation and inclusion. As part of the CoSIE project, undergraduates from Turku University of Applied Sciences have been trained as Community Reporters and using an insight storytelling methodology they have gathered stories of other young people who are encountering a range of challenges in their lives. This insight has been used as the basis of a short report on youth marginalisation.

To access these young people and hear about their lives, the Community Reporters used their personal contacts and went out onto the streets of Turku. This enabled them to engage with young people who are less likely to be engaged with formal services, and through this began to uncover some of the issues that these young people are facing.

What the stories suggest is that having a purpose in life helps young people to create a positive sense of identity, which supports their overall wellbeing. This focus and sense of self helps young people to tackle the difficulties they face. However, as this insight report will detail, equating purpose to ‘having a job’ and linking this to ‘improved wellbeing’ is too simple a correlation to make. The key is that the work or purpose must be something that is fulfilling for the young person. Find out more about this work by downloading the full report below.

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.

Stories can be the means by which people work out their thoughts and ideas: they can be an exploration, a search for meaning or an offering up to others. People’s stories about their experiences provide useful insights into what is happening in their lives and communities. Stories like these are a valuable source of qualitative data that can be used to inform the findings of research projects, provide intricate understandings of issues pertinent to communities, be catalysts of change in service design, advise local and national agendas and policies, and much more.

Through exploring curation methodologies, the Our Voices project seeks to enhance the ways in which people and communities can use their stories to create positive change. This book is a presentation of the project’s initial findings into how people, groups, communities and organisations across Europe are currently collecting, curating and creating impact with stories and how this can be used to develop a pan-European curriculum on story curation. Download the full publication by clicking on the link below.