Back in October PVM joined project partners online for the kickoff meeting for SCRED.

SCRED (Sport Community Report ED) employs the potential of Sport and Community Reporting to empower youth workers in Europe and Africa in stimulating the recognition and use of Sport in its quality as agent of community participation and approach to address the problems and needs of society and, particularly, disadvantaged young people. Sport has a social, economic and educational value as well as presents a substantial potential as agent of inclusion for disadvantaged groups. Sport is widely employed at the level of grassroots youth and civil society groups as an instrument to gather people together for reflecting and acting on common challenges and concerns. In this context, the project employs the methodology of Community Reporting as an instrument for empowering the bottom-up role of social aggregator played by Sport for communities and particularly for disadvantaged categories of youth.

During the kickoff meeting PVM delivered a presentation about Community Reporting and partners took part in group activities to get up to speed on what the methodology involves. Partners learnt about dialogue interviews and snapshot stories and the importance of working with people’s lived experience. We also discussed how Community Reporting will be used in the context of the project and explored the proposed training outline which is set to be completed by Christmas this year.

In March next year the project will deliver a training course in Kampala in Uganda where youth workers will be trained in the practice of Community Reporting, they will also learn how to pass these skills onto young sports leaders in their local communities. This training will feed into a youth exchange where young people who are active in Sport will be trained as Community Reporters who will then carry out a phase of local activity where they will collect community interviews.

Stay tuned for more updates about the project!

Last week members of the PVM team attended the Narratives of Impact project meeting in Sopot, Poland. Project partners from SNDE, COSV, CRN and INTRAS joined PVM at the ‘Our Friendly House Foundation‘ – A supported living space for adults with learning disabilities – for a two day meeting which focused on the future development of a storytelling toolkit.

Digital storytelling has become a popular method for curating communities and has been thriving as a tool for social transformation and social justice. The aim of Narratives of Impact (NOI) is to see storytelling as not only being a powerful tool for creating social change, but also a tool for measuring the impact and change. People’s Voice Media are coordinating a pan-European consortium to deliver this project. Funded by Erasmus+, we are working as a partnership to write a state of play report outlining the current climate for using narratives in impact settings and will produce a toolkit for creating and measuring impact via narratives and will create tutorial videos to support the toolkit. 

At the meeting partners updated each other on the progress of IO2 and collaboratively planned next steps. Partners also settled on an outline for the IO3 toolkit, selecting which chapters they will produce and discussing what content will be included in the video guides. There was also a presentation from The Polish Association for People with Intellectual Disability that explored good practices in digital storytelling. At the end of day one we were joined by Remont Pomp, a percussion band with resident members of the our friendly house foundation community, who performed a selection of songs from their upcoming album. Day 2 included planning for the learning lab which is set to take place in Spain in March 2022, dissemination reporting and a project risk assessment.

Overall the meeting was a huge success and it was great to meet partners in person for the first time!

If you would like to find out more about the Narratives Of Impact project, you can visit the project website here for more information.

Earlier this month our team finally – after almost a year of working remotely – managed to me the EUARENAS consortium in-person in Helsinki, Finland. Although, the jam-packed meeting schedule meant that we didn’t get to see much of what Helsinki has to offer, we did get to get into discussions about participatory and deliberative democracies. So, here’s a bit of a run down of what we took away from the meeting…

On day one, the City of Helsinki presented a case study of how they’d been engaging with citizens. A big takeaway for us was that the first step in this process was the creation of principles for participation that help guide all future activities. The importance of being clear on what underpins participation was a key point highlighted by the City as this helps you to navigate what follows – sort of like how Responsible Storytelling practices underpins Community Reporting, an acts as a guide on storytelling practice.

When discussing how the case study research into existing deliberative and participatory practices would be conducted, partners exchanged thoughts on how Community Reporting and focus interviews could be used to gather different perspectives on each case study. Questions over how authentic people would be with their accounts if it was not anonymous and how we could enable political leaders and other decision-makers to speak honestly given that what they say may cause issues in their careers were raised. The takeaway from this discussion for us was how fundamental relationships of trust are to this type of work, and the importance of creating spaces in which people can share their experiences openly. Hopefully, the project’s forthcoming guidelines on how to work with different actors in the research processes will help in this respect.

On day two, we started to create a common project language – or glossary of terms – that we would use with consistency across the different research activities in the project. What was interesting during this activity was the different perspectives that people from academic, policy and civil society brought to the discussion. Some opted for more pragmatic and to-the-point definitions of key terms, whereas others went for more nuanced and intricate definitions. For us, it seemed that people’s sector played a bigger role in how they approached the definitions than cultural differences.

This day was also our time to shine and provide the partners with some training in Community Reporting. We played a clip from a story from the EuroCohort project and it was great to see how people reacted to it. When the clip was playing our ‘agenda less’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ approach made sense to our partners and they quickly got to grips with some of our techniques and dialogue interviewed each other about their own experiences of democracy. We also showcased an initial set of guidelines that we’ve been working on that combines lived experience storytelling and future-thinking. Partners will be testing out these guidelines over the coming months and by Summer 2022, we’ll have a public set to release – so please do, watch this space!

On the final day, LUISS delivered an interactive workshop on impact. As part of the workshop we worked in groups to start to determine the impact indicators of the pilots in the project. A key point in the subsequent discussion was how do we develop indicators for less tangible impacts (i.e. better quality relationships). This is something that purely quantitative evidence could not demonstrate and is a core thing the project will be grappling with.

And finally, we wanted to give a bit of a shout out to a new tool we were introduced to LUISS – Aha slides: https://ahaslides.com/v2/ This online tool helps with live quizzing and word cloud generation via a presentation format, and seemed to work really well from a range of devices. Definitely one we will be trying out in the future!

People’s Voice Media have teamed up with the NHS in Greater Manchester to gather local people’s recent experiences (i.e., the last 12 months) of GP services. We are gathering these stories to explore what GP services are like for people who are accessing them, exploring what is working well and what could be better. The stories will be used to open up a public conversation in Greater Manchester about GP Services by sharing different people’s stories online and in real world settings.

Who we are looking for

We are looking to commission existing Community Reporters and/or people with experience of storytelling and lived experience based in Greater Manchester to help to gather these stories from communities they are connected with. We are interested in hearing from a diversity of voices from across the area. If you would like to apply for this commission, you would need to:

1. Be able to attend a briefing/training session online at 10am – 12:30pm, Thursday 14^th December.
2. Be able to gather at least audio and/or video 3 stories (this could include you own) about recent experiences of GP services and return them to us (with consent forms) by 7^th January. These stories must be from people living in Greater Manchester. Stories can be gathered in-person or online.
3. Be able to undertake this commission on a freelance/self-employed basis.

Fees

The fee for attending the training AND gathering 3 stories with consent forms is: £200 
The fee for attending the training AND gathering 5 stories with consent forms is: £275

A member of our team will support you remotely to undertake this commission and help overcome any difficulties.

People who contribute their story will also be provided with a £10 e-Gift voucher as a thank you. 

How to get involved

To apply for this commission please complete this short form by 5pm Tuesday 30^th November and we will let successful applicants know by 3^rd December. 

Or if you’d like to share your story you can:

1. Email enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk and we will find a way to include your experience in this piece of work
2. If you have an account on the Community Reporter website, you can upload your own story directly to it (and on ‘ICR Activity’ label it ‘Experiences of GP Services’. Drop us an email to tell us it is there on enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk and we will arrange your £10 e-Gift voucher as a thank you.

Alternatively, if you are an organisation or group in Greater Manchester that would like us to run a free online (or potentially in-person) storytelling session with you, to give you the opportunity to contribute a story then please do get in touch by 30th November on enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk

Since September People’s Voice Media have been working on a new project with volunteers and community members from across the different areas of Manchester.

The project is aimed at using lived experience storytelling to build and enhance meaningful relationships between healthcare professionals, the VCSE sector and communities experiencing health inequalities. There is also a focus on COVID-19 and the vaccination roll out, but the intention is that techniques adopted can be used in different ways in the future. The approach taken will use elements of the Community Reporting methodology to support the activity.

As part of the project, people with existing connections with communities in Manchester experiencing health inequalities have been trained in how to gather lived experience stories around the topic of COVID-19 and the vaccination rollout from their community. They have also taken part in workshops covering how to share these stories – or extracts from them – within their communities to help initiate and hold conversations about health.

Participants who took part in the initial story gathering training went away and gathered 3 stories from individuals in their communities, utilising the digital skills and storytelling practices they had developed to engage with people and start conversations. In the second workshop they learnt about story curation and mobilisation, developing their own plan on how the stories could then be shared within their communities. They are now in the phase of distributing the stories in order to encourage conversations around the topics of health and COVID-19.

The project will run until December 2021, with the final workshop focusing on the key learnings that have emerged from the project and what impact it has had on the communities involved.

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and the PVM Blog for future updates on the project!