We are currently working with Barnsley Museums to explore how Community Reporting and lived experience storytelling can support their evaluation activities, and contribute to an their on-going learning and development. As part of this project, a small team from across Barnsley Museums are being trained as Community Reporters and Trainers, and are experimenting with ways that this method can be used to assess the impact of and gather insights into their work. This training is covering a wide range of areas such as storytelling techniques and responsible storytelling practices, media recording skills, story analysis methods, how to package findings as different types of media products, facilitation approaches and how to run knowledge exchange sessions.

We are delivering the training as an applied project in which the Barnsley Museums team are undertaking a bit of insight and development work that they are using to test out their new skills. Over the last few months, part of the team have been busy gathering and analysing stories about staff wellbeing during the pandemic and the rest of the team have been exploring the learning so far from an anti-racism book club they have set-up. The team are currently learning media-making skills such as video editing and graphic design, so that they can package learning from stories different audiences.

Over the next few weeks, the project will be looking at how the insights from the stories can be used to inform practice at Barnsley Museums and beyond, and how Community Reporting can be embedded into the wider evaluation practices of the organisation. More news coming soon!

Over the last few months we have been working with members from different communities in Hulme, Moss Side and Rusholme as part of the #SharingHealth4U project to create and spread health messages around the flu vaccine. In these areas, flu vaccine uptake within some ethnic minority communities had been low and local knowledge pointed to misinformation about the vaccine being a key contributor to this. Therefore, we’ve be working with people and health care professionals to develop accurate health messages to help combat any myths or ‘fake news’ that is out there.

We started in December devising scripts and text for different types of health messages. These included people’s own personal stories about taking the vaccine, healthcare professionals from the affected communities preparing ‘myth buster’ snippets and pointers as to where people can go to find out more. These messages have been recorded in different languages including Bengali, Urdu, French and Arabic and in formats including audio soundbites, short video clips and text messages. People have since been sending these messages out through their personal and professional networks on social media, messaging services and e-mailers and have been logging how effective these grassroots information sharing methods have been.

So far what we have learned is that (a) messaging services such as WhatsApp and plain text messages are having the biggest reach and (b) that the personal stories around the vaccine have been the most positively received. More so, people felt confident sharing the personal stories as they felt they had a legitimacy in sharing these, more so than the more ‘professional’ or ‘conventional’ health messages.

The whole project has been released over Zoom… which has been a little bit of an issue due to differing levels of tech skills in the group, but we are all continuing to pull together to make it work and get the word out there! We’ll report back later in the year on the results of this work and share with you some know-how and learnings on health messaging driven by communities.

During the coronavirus pandemic, North Kirklees has suffered a very high number of deaths compared to the other areas of the South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Trust. In some cases, two members of the same family have lost their lives to COVID-19, and the wider repercussions on physical and mental health have been numerous.

Between September and December 2020, People’s Voice Media, the Trust, and other local partners, with funding from NHS Charities Together, worked with a group of people from North Kirklees in order to gather stories of lived experience from affected BAME communities in the area, using the Community Reporting methodology. We trained these individuals as Community Reporters and, as part of this training, they have learned different storytelling techniques to enable them to share their own stories and capture stories from across their peer networks. Working with People’s Voice Media, they have curated these stories into a set of findings that we have laid out in an insight briefing which you can download below.

The report presents a picture of an area struggling under a disproportionate amount of bereavement and hardship where, as one storyteller puts it, “everyone is grieving at home on their own.”

Over the last three years, the People’s Voice Media team have been working on the CoSIE H2020 project. This piece of applied research has been exploring how public services across Europe and across different sectors can be co-created. There were pilot projects in Poland, Estonia, Spain, Hungary, The Netherlands, Italy, the UK, Sweden and Finland that ranged from setting-up entrepreneur hubs to enhancing personalisation in probation services and much more. As part of this work, we’ve been using Community Reporting and lived experience more generally to support the design, implementation and on-going evaluation of the pilots.

Following CoSIE’s nine pilot projects, the intention was to test out this learning in a test site in Athens. The Greek test site activities aim to use co-creation to enhance the engagement of individuals and families with low incomes, or who are unemployed, in a local allotment programme in Agios Dimitrios, a suburb of Athens. The gardens, launched in 2011, were designed to provide food for families/people involved, whilst at the same time enhancing environmental values, and reintroducing contact with nature in the city.

Over the last couple of months – and in-line with local restrictions -Community Reporting has been used within the community gardens to gain insight into the programme, spark dialogue between stakeholders, and allow reflection on the various different aspects of the programme. This has been delivered by our colleagues at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, who we first worked alongside as part of the INNOSI H2020 project a few years ago. Around 10 families have participated so far despite the difficulties the team have experienced due to COVID-19.

The stories they have told explore topics such as the benefits of growing their own produced and the ‘spirit’ of the allotment. The insights in the stories will be used to firstly drive the project forward and secondly look for key evaluation points and impact indicates.

We’ll be releasing the findings from these stories soon… so watch this space!

Both in Yorkshire and nationally we know that coronavirus has further exacerbated existing health inequalities. Local insight and work on earlier projects tells us the pandemic is having its greatest impact on more deprived and/or excluded communities in places such as Calderdale, Kirklees, Barnsley and Wakefield. Locally and nationally, there is also evidence to illustrate the disproportionate impact that coronavirus is having on our BAME communities. People’s Voice Media has already started some of this work thanks to community and charity funding in Calderdale and North Kirklees, but our new project, in partnership with Creative Minds and the Association of Mental Health Providers,  will target the most deprived areas in Barnsley Wakefield and South Kirklees.

The project, Mental Health Sustainability, is a focused piece of work to understand the specific needs of the people within these communities, to understand what health and wellbeing support is needed. The project will see us train a network of around 45 Community Reporters from those communities to gather the experiences of the people who live there, and their thoughts on creative activities which would support them.

From the experiences of communities we will then work with our partners to develop culturally sensitive creative projects to meet local needs.

Watch this space…