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.

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.

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.