For many years, storytelling has been applied as a tool for learning and change-making. In recent years, lived experience storytelling in particular, has thrived as a tool for social justice, via the creation of spaces for discussion and exchange. Over the last 6 months, we have been experimenting with combining our own lived experience storytelling method – Community Reporting – with future-thinking activities as part of EUARENAS.

Foresight – or future thinking – provides scope for people to think about the future and use this to model and respond to potential prospective circumstances. In an ever-changing world, it asks us to think about our future, what challenges are on the horizon and how we can address them to achieve shared outcomes. To explore the future of democracy in Europe, partners in Italy, Estonia and Poland have worked with citizens to share experience of democracy in the present day and use them to discuss what the future may hold. In these workshops, citizens used the three horizon framework to map various pathways for the future of democracy in their context.

In the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, they worked with 13 people who were active in their communities and involved in civil society activities. One of the ‘preferred’ visions for the future that this group stated, was that they wanted to increase the diversity of voices involved in democracy: “I only hope that these councils will not always be attended by the same people”. In Voru, Estonia they worked with young people to explore their ideas about democracy and hopes for the future. Similar to the citizens in Reggio Emilia, they wanted to enhance diversity as they felt that currently “the voice of a minority is often not heard”. Finally, in Gdansk, Poland they worked with a heterogeneous group of citizens. Reflecting on the workshop, the Polish team felt that the workshop’s methods supported citizens to speak up – “It is important to sincerely listen to people’s stories, and even sometimes when we lose the topic of discussion, let them talk – because for some people it is the first time that they have a voice.”

In July we will be launching a ‘Lived Experience Storytelling and Future-Thinking’ toolkit and later in the year, we will be sharing with you the learning from these activities as part of an Insight Briefing.

Last week PVM joined UNICORN Project partners in Berlin to take part in a 4 four day training event.

The training, delivered by Vensenya, focused on four key aspects of communications and marketing – Audience Design, Storytelling, Distribution and Audience Building – and how these can be applied to NGO sector organisations.

The training was an opportunity to see how marketing methods and communications strategies traditionally used in the business sector can be applied to smaller, grassroot level, non-profit organisations. Partners were able to reflect on their organisation’s purpose, audience and aims, then think about how these strategically link to approaches to marketing and communications. The training was a success and provided lots of inspiration as to how PVM could improve in terms of the content we share and how we engage with our audience.

The next training will take part in Liverpool in July – stay tuned for more updates!

Since May 2021, People’s Voice Media have been partnering with Ideas Alliance on Not Another Co-Production Project.

The aim of the project is to move co-production from a buzz word into an embedded practice within grassroots organisations across England. We want to facilitate a knowledge exchange which ensures local people become active citizens, are involved in decision making and can shift power in their community, creating equitable partnerships between residents, services and local authorities. We want a future where policy, research and service design are informed by the lived experiences of local people and where collaboration is the norm not the exception.

As part of a 3-year project, Ideas Alliance will work with People’s Voice Media to deliver a co-production development project. This project will benefit local people, professionals and organisations across England, through engaging them in co-production workshops, Community Reporting, annual community learning festivals and a peer support network that connects people and creates a partnership of practice.

The first year of the project has been based in Greater Manchester and has seen a series of workshop delivered on co-production, community reporting and storytelling.

Most recently planning has begun for the first of three community learning festivals, which is set to take place in Manchester this summer. Last week members of Ideas Alliance came together with project contributors from across Greater Manchester at the Science and Industry Museum to discuss what should be included in the festival. The day will be a chance for people to learn more about co-production, challenge their understanding of what it is and most importantly celebrate how it can be used as a tool to create positive change within a range of different settings.

Stay tuned for future updates on the project and keep a look out on socials for invites to the festival!

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.