As part of the Greater Manchester Public Service Reform (GMPSR), the strategy for supporting the most at-need communities has been the adopted of place-based interventions (PBI). This way of working has seen the development of neighbourhood hubs and teams, aimed at supporting residents with multiple needs.

People’s Voice Media’s and our Greater Manchester network have been working with specific PBI teams to gather insight into the lives of residents in the area. These stories have formed the basis of a curated report, which you download below.

User involvement runs through the heart of the Innovative Social Investment: Strengthening communities in Europe (InnoSI) project, and the core aim of Work Package 5 (ran by People’s Voice Media) was to gather ‘User Voice’ on a range of social investment and innovation programmes from across Europe. ‘Stories of Social Investment and Innovation’ is a summative report from Work Package 5: User Voice.

Using Community Reporting practices, we worked with 11 different ‘User Voice’ groups from across 10 countries (Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK) and supported people to tell their stories in relation to topics such as family life, unemployment, education, and integration into society.

These user-created stories not only provide a diverse range of ‘bottom-up’ insights about people’s lived experience of social investment and innovation programmes, but they also give information about the wider contexts of their lives, the challenges that they face and their hopes and aspirations. The report documents the activities of the work package, in relation to the methodological approach taken in the project and findings from the analysis of the stories gathered.