At the end of June, the Co-Engage project held the second in its series of training labs to test the co-creation practices it has researched from across Europe.

The lab, organised by School Raising was hosted in Bologna, Italy and focused on applying our learnings so far to co-create a crowdfunding campaign designed to engage citizens in assisting a local school with a project to improve its facilities and educational offering. Unfortunately, due to ongoing COVID travel restrictions, PVM had to attend online, but it was good to see that many of the partners were able to attend in-person – hopefully we’ll be able to join them soon.

The work in the labs included deciding on a project to crowdfund for, brainstorming pledges and settling on the amount we would charge for each one (think The Price is Right!). We also discussed how we could publicise the campaign, settled on a name and shared contacts we could use to help us gain support, before presenting our ideas to each other and finalising the campaign.

Although managing a hybrid training lab with a mix of online and offline participants was certainly a challenge, the School Raising team and the rest of the partners who were attending in person did everything they could to ensure online attendees were able to engage with discussions. We even got a quick tour of the venue at one point!

The next lab is in Toulouse later this month – one we will also be attending online – but, hopefully, come August we’ll be able to meet our Co-Engage partners in-person for the first time in 17 months.

Unfortunately, due to ongoing travel restrictions our second transnational partnership meeting (TNP) for Narratives of Impact couldn’t happen in Milan as previously hoped, so instead we met online for one-and-a-half days of project updates, planning and, if course a good chat about food, wine and travel.

Hosted by COSV, PVM attended along with fellow partners INTRAS, CRN, and SNDE. It was great to catch up with everyone and the meeting felt productive. We’re all excited about this project, which will be releasing its first intellectual output very soon.

One of the highlights was a presentation by one of the project’s stakeholders, Julia Schieber of Friedrich Alexander University of Nuremberg, who talked to us about the Odisseu Project. The project aims to give young people a better understanding of the lives of refugees and has used lived experience storytelling to produce an interactive game where the player can follow one of three characters’ stories as they experience becoming a refugee. On the second day of the meeting we had a chance to play the game and it gave us all some interesting ideas around storytelling, its uses and its impacts.

We’re hoping that for our next TNP in November we can all be together in the same space but, in the meantime, keep an eye on our blog for the release of our first piece of work on this project.

COVID-19 has greatly impacted on the wellbeing of communities in South and West Yorkshire. This project looks at health inequalities with a particular focus on the disproportionate impact that coronavirus is having on our BAME communities. (This work may include other priorities and look at how children and young people, the homeless, those in contact with the criminal justice system, the LGBT community, and those suffering domestic abuse have been affected, depending on local information.)

To explore this further and see how creativity can support people in these communities, People’s Voice Media and Creative Minds have partnered on a collaborative project, with funding from the Association of Mental Health Providers, using digital storytelling to listen to the voices of people in Barnsley, South Kirklees and Wakefield. We trained people from the area as Community Reporters in order to gather stories from others about their wellbeing throughout the pandemic, and how creativity has helped them. These stories of lived experience were then examined by the Community Reporters in a series of sense-making sessions in order to pull out common themes, which have been used to make recommendations for developing creative mental health interventions with local communities. The insight report produced focuses on the insights from the stories and what can be done with the learnings from them.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had many people asking what wellbeing means to them, what stops them being well, and what keeps them healthy. As part of a collaborative project taking place in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, People’s Voice Media has worked with residents and people who work in North Halifax to better understand their health needs.

We trained people from North Halifax as Community Reporters in order to gather stories from others about their health and wellbeing, and what really matters to the people in the area. These stories of lived experience were then examined by the Community Reporters in a series of sense-making sessions in order to pull out common themes, which have been used to make recommendations for commissioning health and wellbeing initiatives in the area. These findings were put into an insight report, which focuses on the insights from the stories and what can be done with the learnings from them. It is now available for download, demonstrating the stark health inequalities that exist and have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

The CoSIE Horizon 2020 applied research project supported the creation of collaborative partnerships between citizens, public sector agencies and services, non- governmental organisations and civil society actors, and private companies. It researched, through practical application processes, how public services can be enhanced via co- creation.

People’s Voice Media led a stream of work that supported public services across Europe to use lived experience storytelling as a tool for co-creation to support service design, delivery, and evaluation. As part of this work, we used our specific approach to lived experience storytelling – Community Reporting – which is a mixed methodological approach for enhancing citizen participation in research, policy-making, service development, and decision-making processes. Watch this short video to find out more about how lived experience storytelling was used in the CoSIE project.

This toolkit synthesises the key learning from these activities and presents a set of resources to help services work with lived experience.