This is our fifth blog in a series about how Community Reporting has been used as a tool for co-creation in the CoSIE project. In this final blog post, we wanted to share with you some of the impacts that we have had through applying Community Reporting in nine different public services across Europe…

During the CoSIE project a number impacts have been identified and we have divided these into three categories:

• Individual (ideologies and behaviours):e.g. a person could change their perception of a topic; a professional could change their practice. 
• Organisational (delivery and spaces):e.g. an organisation may change the ways it does things; a service or space could be re-designed, re-purposed or co-created from scratch.
• Systemic (society and culture):e.g. a policy could change or be introduced; practice could change across a whole sector; social norms may change. 

If we first look at the impact Community Reporting has had at an individual level, we can see that it has enabled people to develop digital and other transferable skills (i.e. active listening). More so, the concept of using stories for social change purposes has galvanised residents of specific estates and villages (specifically in relation to the Polish and Hungarian pilots) to see themselves as active actors in local change-making processes. Additionally, the insights in some of the stories have changed people’s actions. For example, in the UK pilot a probation worker, upon listening to the stories, decided to make more phone calls to his cases in between formal supervision sessions to make them feel more supported. It has also helped more voices – particularly those from groups who services usually find easy to ignore – to be heard. This has included unemployed people voicing their experiences of encounters with services in the Netherlands, disabled adults’ voices being used to frame the hackathons in Estonia, and young people on the edges of society using their stories to create more accurate personas aimed at influencing service design in Finland.

At an organisational level, we have also made some clear impact. The adoption of Community Reporting in the UK pilot – based in a probation service – completely shifted the organisation’s stance of digital media and the Internet. Initially, the probation service involved in the UK pilot was fearful of the use of digital media and the internet within the service but through the application of Community Reporting they have overcome these reservations as they have seen the benefits of its use in context. As one of the academic partners observed:

Community Reporting was [initially] not well understood – it is very different than social media but people in the staff thought that it was a way of using service user voice for entertainment in a shallow way. We think that, that understanding was based on a very deep-rooted fear in social media in the service of its service user being shamed and stigmatised. 

However, the successfulness of the intervention has shifted this view and led to the pilot gathering the most stories in the project and booking in additional sessions to support the service’s workers’ and volunteers’ learning. Furthermore, they have installed a TV screen in the reception area that plays people’s stories about working for or accessing probation services. This represents an organisational shift in attitude towards this specific type of technology. 

Additionally, the Community Reporter stories have had a direct influence on the delivery of a number of public services. For example, in Spain this led the pilot to move away from a standard business training programme into a more fluid mentoring and peer-learning model. In the Netherlands, this refocused their thinking and set a slightly different agenda (or theory of change) than the pilot had initially anticipated. In Italy, the insights from the families have directly informed the App’s design – shifting focus from a medical model way of thinking to a more social model. More so, through the staff involved in these services being trained in the methodology it means that the organisations now have another tool to use when working with citizens that can support their work in the future.

At a systemic level, the main impact has been in building communities and networks. For example, in Hungary, the participants have established their own closed Facebook group on which they are sharing their stories and using these to share information and knowledge between themselves. This has led to an online community being built. More so, in Poland, they actively engaged wider organisations associated with the emerging Local Activity Centres in the Community Reporting training. This indicates the potential for a city-wide network of organisations in Wroclaw using Community Reporting to better understand the needs of the communities that they serve. 

Whilst there have been some indicators of wider impact, it is unsurprising that systemic impact is an area where little change has occurred. This is because this type of change and impact often takes longer to come into fruition and is usually influenced by interconnected, networked and incremental changes at individual and organisation levels. Furthermore, in the CoSIE project, Community Reporting has not necessarily been aimed at influencing the policy arena – which is a contributor to systemic change – and instead has been applied as a co-creation tool, which lends itself to the individual and organisation impact fields. It also provides different types of data (e.g. experiential knowledge) and understanding (e.g. empathy and non-silo thinking) than institutions are used to working with. It takes time for innovations like this to become less marginalised and more accepted in the mainstream. Essentially, Community Reporting seeks to re-humanise such processes and the services that they govern. This in itself is a paradigmatic shift in terms of how societal and governmental institutions operate, and cannot happen overnight. In short, the move to more relationally-driven rather than process-driven public services, beyond specific pilots and into national and pan-European standards, is a longer journey than the CoSIE project. 

However, it is a journey that People’s Voice Media and the Community Reporter movement are committed to seeing through in the long term. In this vein, we will be hosting a series of online and offline policy-themed events over the next year, as well as producing a ‘practical guide’ to working with experiential knowledge in co-creative ways. In June, we are running an event to help us thing through what this guide will be – so if you’d like to join us to learn about our approach and also share your expertise and ideas, book your place here.

If you want to read the introductory blog in this series or the previous ones on how we’ve used Community Reporting as a tool for insight, as a tool for dialogue or as a tool for reflection, then click on the links.

This is our fourth blog in a series about how Community Reporting has been used as a tool for co-creation in the CoSIE project. In this blog post, we wanted to share with you some of the learning from applying Community Reporting as a tool for reflection, and explore some of our successes and challenges during this process…

In the CoSIE project, Community Reporting has been used as a tool that encourages introspective reflection to support co-evaluation processes, providing opportunities for different stakeholders to explore what is working/valued, what is not working/valued, and future directions and sustainability. Some of the key strengths in using Community Reporting in this way have been:

• It supports introspection in a quick and accessible manner, and can support people’s individual self-development as well as the development of services.
• It can be applied at different moments in a co-creation process to provide on-going learning and development, rather than just summative evaluation.
• It supports active and deep listening that helps people to better understand different perspectives and situations.

Speaking about Community Reporting as a tool for reflection, the Spanish pilot identified that the unemployed people they are working with to set-up their own businesses used Community Reporting to become more “conscious about their journey” and could better seen their own development. Similarly, the Hungarian pilot found that it helped the families involved in their household economies project “articulate their minds on their present and previous situations”. This was achieved at both a “surface and also on a deeper level“.

A potential limitation of the method as a tool for reflection is that you cannot always guarantee that people will share their reflections consistently over a period of time. For example, as the Community Reporters gather and share their own stories voluntarily they can choose when to contribute and when not to. This makes it difficult, but not impossible, to do a longitudinal style reflection.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore the impact that Community Reporting has had as part of the CoSIE project, and if you want to read the introductory blog in this series or the previous ones on how we’ve used Community Reporting as a tool for insight or a tool for dialogue, then click on the links.

People’s Voice Media are excited to be part of CONCRIT, a European project that aims to work towards a socially cohesive Europe, by designing a training programme in ‘Community Narration For Critical Thinking’. This training programme will use digital storytelling and critical thinking to help to develop; self-confident, fully informed and educated citizens.

The project will work with adult educators, volunteers and community workers focused on civic education to develop an effective training path for members of marginalised communities to access, to learn and to develop ways to build resilient communities and to de-construct discriminatory stereotypes.

It’s been great to see the project moving forward despite the lockdown, with the launch of the new website and wonderfully bright flyers. Check the website out here. 

This is our third blog in a series about how Community Reporting has been used as a tool for co-creation in the CoSIE project. In this blog post, we wanted to share with you some of learning from applying Community Reporting as a tool for dialogue between different people, and explore some of our successes and challenges during this process…

In the CoSIE project, Community Reporting as a tool for dialogue has been used as an initial engagement activity for stakeholders, to generate ideas for the pilots and to exchange knowledge between different people, groups and organisations. Some of the key strengths in using Community Reporting in this way have been:

• It supports people to think ‘out of the box’ and from ‘different perspectives’. This can help improve problem-solving.
• It helps people, groups and organisations to share knowledge via storytelling and thus more effectively learn from one another’s experiences.
• Its focus on equity helps to provides opportunities for people with opposing or differing perspectives and experiences to engage in a non-hierarchical dialogue. In doing so, voices that are often unheard are listened to.

Reflecting on their usage of Community Reporting as a tool for dialogue, the Italian pilot talks about how stories gathered from families about their wellbeing and health, helped to highlight “less obvious issues and helped in rethinking the project in some way” for the healthcare professionals involved. In essence, providing a scenario in which stories from families could be heard by medical workers and the people steering the pilot, helped them to see things from their perspective. This ultimately led to the understanding that the App they were seeking to create to tackle childhood obesity needed to be more relational. More so, the UK pilot felt that through the Conversation of Change events, the probation service was able to “hear people’s views directly” and speak together as people on probation, peer mentors/volunteers, probation workers and service managers to celebrate what is working but also address what isn’t.

In terms of the issues we encountered in using Community Reporting as a dialogue tool in CoSIE, it was felt sometimes that it was hard to reach a consensus between different perspectives as there were too many ideas. More so, for the Swedish pilot, they felt that it was too difficult for the people with cognitive disabilities they worked with to participate in a dialogue about their stories with decision-makers. To get over this obstacle, the pilot used recordings of the stories at key decision-making meetings as a means of bringing those people’s experiences to the space.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore how Community Reporting has been applied as tool for reflection in the CoSIE project, and if you want to read the introductory blog in this series or the previous one on how we’ve used Community Reporting as a tool for insight, then click on the hyperlinked words.

Within the on-going COVID-19 crisis there is a danger that the most marginalised communities across Europe are left out of this conversation. It is important to us, and our movement of Community Reporters, that people who are under-resourced and who often occupy the positions of least power are involved in this dialogue. This is why we are launching an Institute of Community Reporters collective project – #COVIDConversations – to gather stories about the crisis from voices that may go unheard.

In response to requests of our partners from across Europe, we have created a space on the Community Reporter website for an online archive of everyday experiences of the life during the COVID-19 outbreak. We plan to work with these stories in the future and share the learnings in them with a wider audience. It is important that these stories are not forgotten and that the insights in them are heard and use in the future as we rebuild and change our world. It is vital that all kinds of voices are included and that the people who share and gather these stories are active actors in this moment of change within our shared history.

So, how can you get involved?

1. COMMUNITY REPORTER – CALL TO ACTION
   We are asking all of our existing Community Reporters to log into www.communityreporter.net and upload your own personal story about your experiences of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. This can be a short piece of text, a photo, an audio clip or video. When you upload them, make sure you select ‘COVID Conversations’ as the ICR Network on the drop-down menu. Click here to download a quick ‘How to upload your story’ guide.
2. UPSKILLING THE NETWORK
   We will be running an online training session for existing active Community Reporters, existing Trainers, current Social Licensees and wider Support Partners to equip them with the skills to gather stories via remotely. The session will be delivered in May (date TBC) and each attendee will then gather 5+ stories each from their own networks, with a keen focus on unheard voices. If you’ve like to take part, email us. Places are limited.
3. ONLINE STORYTELLING SESSIONS
   The People’s Voice Media team will be delivering one-to-one storytelling sessions with people online and via the phone, to gather their experiences of the crisis. These sessions are designed to include people who may otherwise be excluded, and will run on the 10th and 23rd June. We are asking our partners and members to help us find people to participate. If you know someone who is willing to share an experience and would like to speak one-to-one with our team, drop us an email.