COMMUNITY REPORTING AS A TOOL FOR INSIGHT

This is our second 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 our learnings from applying Community Reporting as a tool for insight gathering, and explore some of our successes and challenges during this process…

In the CoSIE project, Community Reporting as an insight tool has been applied to collate and analyse stories about topics pertinent to the co-creation processes (i.e. to better understand the problem being tackled through the co-creation process). Some of the key strengths in using Community Reporting in this way have been:

  • It gathers richer qualitative data than other more traditional research approaches do and helps to better understand ‘wicked’ or complex problems.
  • It can help services to better engage with groups who would otherwise not usually have their voices heard – storytelling as a medium and our peer-to-peer approach is generally seen as being accessible to most people.
  • It can help to address power imbalances between services and the people who access them by providing citizens with a chance to set the agenda.
  • It provides a method for working with stories so that experiential knowledge can be gleaned from them and used as an alternative form of data.

Speaking about their experience of working with Community Reporting, the pilot in the Netherlands stated that “It’s not rocket science. It’s a basic thing that, as a civil servant, we tend to have an agenda – a well-meaning agenda but an agenda nonetheless. [Community Reporting] took us away from our agenda and allowed people to make their own.” In doing so, they got a richer understanding of the issues behind why people were unemployed in their municipality than they did from statistics. This reframed how they thought about the problem, and thus influenced the interventions that the pilot is currently testing out.

In terms of some of the challenges we have encountered in using Community Reporting in the project, we found that:

  • It can take more time and resource to apply than other simpler data collation techniques (i.e. surveys)
  • It can be difficult for some groups to engage with due to the digital technologies involved and the barriers they present
  • It is an innovative tool for data gathering and sometimes not recognised by traditional ‘powers’

Speaking about one of these barriers, the Polish pilot explains how the older people they were working with “don’t get on well with the technology… it’s really hard for them“. Despite this, what they did connect with, was the idea of belonging to a social change movement and they have used this identity to spear-head change in their area.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore how Community Reporting has been applied as tool for dialogue in the CoSIE project, and if you want to read the introductory blog in this series, you can do so here.

USING COMMUNITY REPORTING AS A TOOL FOR CO-CREATION

Over the last two-and-a-half years, People’s Voice Media has been leading a stream of work in the CoSIE project that supports public services across Europe to uses Community Reporting as a tool for co-creation. In the UK, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Finland and Sweden, we have worked with different services – from employment support to probation services – to embed storytelling and lived experience into their service design, delivery, and evaluation in meaningful ways. Over the next month or so, we are going to blog some of the key learnings from this experience here…

So, where to start? Well, firstly through looking back with hindsight at the ways we have used Community Reporting in the different public services, we can see that this application can be summarised into three key ways:

  1. As a tool for insight
  2. As a tool for dialogue
  3. As a tool for reflection

While these three types of application are distinct, there are overlaps between them and they can be combined as the Venn diagram below details.

As an insight tool, Community Reporting broadly fits into the realms of participatory and empowerment research fields. It engages citizens, people who work in services and other stakeholders to be a part of an insight-gathering and identifying process by sharing their stories and co-curating them into concrete findings. Through this, traditional power imbalances between the researcher and the research subject are reduced.

As a tool for creating dialogue, Community Reporting aids communication by providing people with the tools to use storytelling to engage in conversations with their peers and other people beyond their peer groups. Using stories as part of Conversation of Change events stimulates dialogue between different stakeholders about a topic, issue, service etc. Community Reporter stories can also be used as communication aids to talk to decision-makers. Such practices enable different voices and understandings of the world to be explored in an equitable manner, and can help to make decision-making processes transparent.

Finally, as a tool for reflection, Community Reporting supports people to reflect on their experiences and the experiences of others. This proactive, critical reflection provides people with the space and time to more deeply understand how they and others experience the world, and thus support people to identify how public (and other) services can better support their needs.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore how Community Reporting has been applied as a tool for insight in the CoSIE project, and identify some of the strengths of this approach, and the challenges we have encountered.

ZOOM WORKS WONDERS FOR CONCRIT ONLINE MEETING

As you’ve probably already guessed, last month’s Concrit TNP meeting in Poland was cancelled due to Covid-19 restrictions. But PVM and our European partners weren’t deterred and we still met online using Zoom.

It was good to see everyone looking well and positive despite the grim circumstances and Zoom proved to be an excellent tool for collaborative online working. We were able to move the project onwards and make decisions about how to adapt to these challenging times. We all agreed that digital storytelling and criticall thinking for marginilised groups is even more important than ever.

If ever there is a time to share lived experiences it is now.

You can see Kath’s full ideas sheet from the meeting here.

EUROSPECTIVES ATHENS MEETING WENT AHEAD… WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM SKYPE

Three weeks ago just before lockdown in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, the Eurospective meeting went ahead with the aid of Skype for the Italian, Spanish and Austrian partners.

Despite not being able to completely ‘get together’, it was a very positive meeting that moved the project forward, with partners making steps towards the co-creation of a Digital Storytelling Curriculum for Social Change.

This will be the last non-virtual face to face we will have for a while, but we had a fantastic time in spite of everything – as out photos will attest.

You can read more detail about the meeting over on the Eurospectives blog.

THE MEN’S ROOM – WHAT STOPS US FROM BEING WELL?

This month, after a jam-packed end to 2019 and start to 2020, we’ve been reflecting on our partnership with The Men’s Room in Manchester having worked with them over the last few months to complete Phase 1 of their ‘What Stops Us From Being Well?’ project.

People’s Voice Media delivered a series of training days between October and January including a 2-day Community Reporting for Insight programme held at the LGBT Foundation in Manchester, a set of follow-up story gathering support sessions on site at The Men’s Room itself, a celebratory event just before Christmas and a day of story review and curation training in January. 

The celebratory Christmas event in December, was held at the lovely co-working Zeiferblat venue in Manchester, and was a wonderful chance to bring current and potential participants, staff and partners together. People’s Voice Media gave a short presentation and screened an edited video which they had created from the stories that had been gathered.

The learning from the stories which were gathered as part of the Community Reporting training during Phase 1 are now forming the basis of ideas informing and feeding into Phases 2 and 3 of the ‘What Stops Us From Being Well?’ project.

Phase 2 will culminate in an exhibition of artworks produced by participants with an accompanying soundscape of the gathered stories to be produced by People’s Voice Media. 

The learning and ideas from the exhibition and the growing archive of gathered stories will continue on into Phase 3, informing the script and performance of a piece of legislative theatre later in 2020. People’s Voice Media will also be delivering some additional training later this year, so stay tuned for updates as the project continues!

You can watch and listen to the stories from the project by searching for ‘What Stops Us From Being Well?’ on the www.communityreporter.net website.