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.

Active Calderdale wants to better understand the lives of Calderdale residents and how they interact, connect with and relate to the people and organisations around them. They are particularly interested in exploring people’s attitudes and motivations towards physical activity. Through storytelling, they hope to understand how people can become more active in different ways that have a meaningful and positive impact on people’s overall lives. 

As part of this project, People’s Voice Media worked with local Community Reporters to hold a short workshop to listen to stories from local people and identify things we can learn from them about what motivates people to be active and what gets in the way. The stories were gathered during the COVID-19 pandemic and some of the key learnings identified in the session were:

1. People who had been shielding/isolating during the pandemic may feel reluctant or anxious about leaving home – support and understanding is needed to help people work through this.
2. Winter is a particularly challenging time to ‘get out’ and exercise. Darker evenings and colder weather means that people are more likely to stay indoors.
3. Keeping active is easier when you are doing it alongside people – the social side and encouragement from others makes it a better experience.
4. The pandemic has stopped a lot of sports and exercise activities. This means that people have been used to being less active and therefore encouragement back into activity is key.
5. We are all influencers… we all have the power to encourage those around us to be more active. Trust is also important – when there is a relationship of trust, people are more likely to be positively influenced by that person and join them in different activities. This can build people’s confidence in trying new things.

The stories we looked at in the session were from the health inequalities work current taking place in Calderdale that is being led by VAC. They can all be viewed here.

Today we had our last project meeting for Eurospectives 2.0. 

The project started in 2018 bringing together different partners from Greece, Spain, Germany, Denmark and the UK to explore ways to use Digital Storytelling in non-formal and formal education. Activists, community facilitators, teachers and educators, creative practitioners and NGO’s, worked together testing out different methods, approaches and digital tools to produce a new curriculum with Digital Storytelling as its main focus. 

At the start of this project the world was quite a different place. With the onslaught of Covid 19 we found that we had to rely on digital tools to ensure that we were able to continue to co-create and collaborate, and with some adaptations we succeeded. Also, with the UK leaving the EU, collaboration with our European partners was even more important, making the project even more crucial and relevant.

The curriculum covers, Storytelling for Wellbeing, Collective Storytelling, Storytelling for Teachers and Storytelling for Activists. We hope that this curriculum will be a guide for facilitators, teachers and trainers to champion Digital Storytelling and to encourage people to find ways to tell their own stories.

Over this last year people’s well-being has been tested and many people are suffering. With countries clamping down on democratic rights it is crucial that citizens are able to discover ways to become resolute and actively participate in positive change from the ground up. 

If ever there has been a time to use digital storytelling to create positive social change, then the time is now, and here we have a useful tool that can support people to become storytellers for positive change.

Kath Peters – PVM’s Project lead for Eurospectives 2.0