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.

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.

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.

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.

Last month People’s Voice Media hot-footed it down to the Midlands to work alongside some of the brightest young talents from schools in the area and the Aimhigher team, delivering an introduction to video production techniques to a group of 30+ high school students as part of the Student Voice project.

The workshop which took place at Aston University, covered pre-production research, filming tips and techniques, editing using open source software and finished with an introduction to blog writing and lots of lovely pizza! 

In just 3 hours, the group of teenagers were able to form production teams, capture footage, refine their interview techniques, pull together a series of final edits using mobile technology, critique blog writing styles and start to write their own.

The main aim of the workshop was to help the students expand their media production techniques, so that they would have the skills and confidence to cover the wide range of events and activities as part of the Aimhigher / Student Voice programme in 2020 and beyond. 

We can’t wait to see how they use their skills in the future!