At People’s Voice Media, our core value is that people should be able to tell their own stories, on their own terms, and those stories should be used to create understanding and influence change.

As part of Touretteshero’s Knowledge Builders programme, Isaac Samuels, Head of Partnerships and Campaigns at People’s Voice Media, is using this approach to explore an important and sometimes difficult question: what does anti-racism mean to disabled people, and how can disabled communities build stronger solidarity in challenging racism?

The project brings together Community Reporting, lived experience and co-production approaches to create opportunities for disabled people to share their perspectives and experiences.

Creating space for different experiences

Disabled communities are incredibly diverse. People’s experiences of disability are shaped by many other parts of their lives, including race, culture, class, gender, sexuality and where they live.

However, conversations about disability and conversations about racism do not always happen together.

Recent political and social debates have also highlighted difficult questions about racism, migration and the ways in which the experiences and frustrations of disabled people can sometimes become connected with far-right or racist narratives.

Rather than avoiding these difficult conversations, the project aims to create space to understand them.

The intention is not to judge people or tell people what they should think. Instead, the work asks what disabled people themselves think about racism and anti-racism, what helps or prevents people from engaging in these conversations, and what could make anti-racism more accessible and meaningful across disabled communities.

Using lived experience to create insight

This approach connects strongly with People’s Voice Media’s wider Community Reporting work.

Community Reporting supports people to tell authentic stories about their lives and experiences. These stories can then be brought together through our Insight process, where lived experience is used to identify common themes, challenges, opportunities and learning.

For this project, disabled people are being invited to contribute through a survey and shared conversations.

The aim is to reach beyond the people and organisations who are already involved in equality or anti-racism work and hear from a broad range of disabled people, including people whose perspectives may not usually be represented in research, policy or organised disability spaces.

Take part in the survey:
https://touretteshero.typeform.com/to/bxYMB5Pe

From stories to change

At People’s Voice Media, we believe that gathering stories should never be the end of the process. Stories and lived experience can help us understand what is happening in people’s lives, but they can also help communities, organisations and decision-makers think differently about what needs to change.

Once the stories and survey responses have been gathered, the project will bring the learning together to identify key themes and develop practical recommendations. The ambition is to share this learning with Disabled People’s Organisations, Disability Rights UK, anti-racism organisations and other partners and networks.

There are also plans to explore bringing disabled people and organisations together for a roundtable conversation about the findings and what action could follow. Ultimately, the project hopes to contribute to a longer conversation about how disabled communities can challenge racism while building stronger relationships and solidarity across different communities.

Help us hear more voices

We want to hear from disabled people with different experiences, backgrounds and perspectives.

You do not need to be an expert in anti-racism, disability rights or equality to contribute.

We are particularly interested in hearing from people who might not normally participate in research or organised disability spaces.

If you are a disabled person, please consider completing the survey and sharing it with others in your community.

Take part in the survey:
https://touretteshero.typeform.com/to/bxYMB5Pe

You can find out more about Touretteshero’s Knowledge Builders programme here:

https://www.touretteshero.com/2026/06/09/knowledge-builders-the-first-cohort

If you are an organisation, community group or network and would like to help share the project or contribute to the conversation, we would also love to hear from you.

Through Community Reporting, we know that change starts by listening differently. This project is another opportunity to ensure disabled people’s experiences are not simply collected, but heard, understood and used to help shape what happens next.

2025 saw the launch of a new 3 year Children in Need funded project, which will give young people the skills to use lived experience storytelling as a tool for social change.

Since launching Future Changemakers, we have partnered with youth organisations in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester to deliver Community Reporter Training and Train the Trainer workshops to young people, staff and volunteers. The groups have developed tools to tell their own stories and that of their peers and shape these into ideas for social action.

Last week concluded a series of sessions that up-skilled volunteers from Army of Kindness in facilitation techniques relating to Community Reporting. Staff and volunteers are now equipped to deliver the Community Reporter training they took part in last year. We can’t wait to see how they embed this approach to storytelling in their work.

Army of Kindness alongside West Midlands Police Cadets are the first organisations to form the foundation of the growing Future Changemakers Community Reporter Network. As we move into the 2nd year of the project we will be partnering with more youth organisations starting with Bristol and Liverpool and hope to broaden our reach and connect with more people.

If you’d like to know more about this work please reach out to Lauren@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk and Georgia@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk to find out more.

Over the past year, People’s Voice Media have worked with Thera Scotland to gather lived-experience stories reflecting on the importance of accountability in adult social care in Scotland.

Members, volunteers and caregivers from Thera spoke with friends and family about their experiences and what improvements could be made to the system.

These conversations were curated into a video and shared at a conversation of change event on the 29th of June 2026 to raise awareness and support advocacy and service improvement.

We will be sharing the film publicly over the next couple of weeks so watch this space!

We’re big fans of projects that really showcase the versatility of Community Reporting, and those that put communities and people at the heart of local decision-making in truly meaningful ways. So, you could say that working as evaluation partners on Bristol City Council’s Community Resilience Fund was a dream collaboration for People’s Voice Media. Read on to find out more about this people-powered project that put funds into the hands of grassroots local organisations, and how we used lived experience methodologies to assess its impacts.

Bristol City Council’s (BCC) Community Resilience Fund was a £4m grant fund designed to support community organisations with capital works, especially those that challenged power imbalances in the most deprived communities by improving accessibility, sustainability or offering other future-proofing benefits. The council worked very hard to ensure that people from the local community had a say in where the funding went, how it was allocated and how it was spent. This included having a panel of 100 community experts acting as “resident decision-makers”, supported by local councillors and experts in sustainability, accessibility and capital works. Community and voluntary groups seeking funding were guided through the grant-making process by the BCC Communities Team and by capacity-building organisations WECIL (West of England Centre For Inclusive Living), BSWN (Black South West Network) and Voscur, to ensure greater equity in the application process. But BCC also wanted to make sure that the evaluation of the funding followed the same process and centred community power and participation. That’s where People’s Voice Media came in!

Community Reporting for evaluation

From the panel of community decision makers, seven people were recruited and trained as Community Reporters. The training from People’s Voice Media gave them the skills to conduct video and audio interviews with the grantee organisations, using open questions to explore the on-the-ground experience of applying for the grant, how the money has been used, and what impact it has had on beneficiaries, staff and the local community. We also conducted sense-making sessions with the Community Reporters to help understand what the key themes were emerging from the stories gathered, which then informed the findings in the evaluation report. You can watch our short Impact Snapshot film for some of the highlights from the 23 stories gathered or find all the video and audio interviews here. Some of the headline findings from the Community Reporting phase of the evaluation process were:

• The CRF grant allowed community groups and organisations to meet diverse community needs
• The improvements funded by the CRF broadened and deepened the organisations’ reach within the community
• Organisations achieved greater financial resilience through cost reduction
• The CRF allocations supported strategic planning and futureproofing
• The CRF process was a positive, trust-based funding experience

Ripple Effect Mapping for evaluation

We also wanted to give the grantee organisations space to explore themselves what the impact of receiving the funding had been so far. People’s Voice Media facilitated Ripple Effect Mapping sessions with representatives from 20 of the community groups that received the funding, where they could explore the impact that the works funded from the grant has had on their organisations, individuals and society. (More about Ripple Effect Mapping coming up in a future blog!) A thematic analysis of the maps was then carried out, which identified the following key areas of change across the participating community organisations:

• Accessibility and inclusion
• Skills development and employment creation
• Income generation
• Environmental sustainability
• Support for mental health and wellbeing
• Improvement of community offerings

Evaluation findings

From all this detailed qualitative research, we were able to produce an in-depth analysis of the impacts of the Community Resilience Fund, and also a set of detailed learnings and specific recommendations useful to Bristol City Council and other local authorities or grant-makers looking to support community capital works projects in the future. 

You can read about these in more detail in the Executive Summary or download the Full Report.

If you are interested in finding out more about how People’s Voice Media can support your organisation or local authority to undertake evaluation in a way that prioritises the voice of communities, please get in touch. You can contact us at enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk.

Gaddum is an organisation based in Manchester that offers mental health and carer support services. Over autumn and winter 2025/26, People’s Voice Media held online training workshops to teach Gaddum’s peer researchers and other volunteers new skills in Community Reporting and working with lived experience stories. We recently caught up with Gaddum to find out how the Community Reporting had been going 6 months on…

When they first got in touch, Gaddum already recognised that stories were key to understanding both the impact of their work and the needs of the people they support. They were already collecting stories in different ways, but using People’s Voice Media’s Community Reporting methodology gave them a framework for collecting and analysing lived experience stories and upskilled their organisation. The people taking part in the project were a mix of paid peer researchers and volunteers from the co-production side of Gaddum. Everyone had lived experience of being a carer or mental health challenges.

The training supported two different aspects of Gaddum’s work. One, funded from the Accelerated Reform Fund, was to help Gaddum evaluate the impact of the Shared Lives and Hospital Discharge schemes. The other was to upskill people working on the co-production arm of Gaddum. This holistic approach enabled Gaddum to access the training and they now have a small pool of Community Reporters who can work on different projects as they emerge. At People’s Voice Media, we like to talk about “feeding two birds with one seed” and this project definitely achieved that!

We delivered the training online via Zoom. This helped bring the project into budget and also made it accessible to people with caring responsibilities and other disabilities who might not be able to travel to an in-person session. Through our Zoom room we managed to have some very in-depth discussions and I was particularly struck by how thoughtful and considerate the group were around the ethical issues of Community Reporting, something that we cover in our Safe and Responsible Practice element of our training.

“I thought people that were attending were getting a lot out of it, because they were asking a lot of questions, they seem really actively involved.” Project Manager for ARF, Gaddum

As homework, one Community Reporter collected a story about a person’s journey to autism diagnosis. We used this story to practice our story curation skills and had a great discussion about it, identifying key themes like the importance of support, the importance of education, the intersection between neurodivergence and mental health, and the usefulness of diagnosis as a way to understand the self and the past.

“It’s very rarely done in this way, it… nobody else does it in this way. I’m sure there are other Community Reporters in Manchester, but not in the way that we’ve done it, combined into our things around system change.” Coproduction and Engagement Service Manager, Gaddum

After completing the evidence-gathering for the ARF project, Gaddum are now looking at places to employ their Community Reporters and their skills in other areas of the organisation, such as their recent Manchester Living Well project. Although attendance and retention issues meant that fewer people completed the training than anticipated, Gaddum are still glad to have a small pool of people with these new skills, who are now going on to get more involved with other opportunities within the organisation.

“We always want to upskill and build the confidence of people, and that was just a brilliant way to do it.” Lived Experience Worker, Gaddum

If your organisation would like to use Community Reporting, a rigorous and responsible methodological framework for peer-to-peer lived experience storytelling, we can put together a bespoke training package to meet your needs and budget. Please get in touch with us at enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk to have a chat.