Stories can be the means by which people work out their thoughts and ideas: they can be an exploration, a search for meaning or an offering up to others. People’s stories about their experiences provide useful insights into what is happening in their lives and communities. Stories like these are a valuable source of qualitative data that can be used to inform the findings of research projects, provide intricate understandings of issues pertinent to communities, be catalysts of change in service design, advise local and national agendas and policies, and much more.

Through exploring curation methodologies, the Our Voices project seeks to enhance the ways in which people and communities can use their stories to create positive change. This book is a presentation of the project’s initial findings into how people, groups, communities and organisations across Europe are currently collecting, curating and creating impact with stories and how this can be used to develop a pan-European curriculum on story curation. Download the full publication by clicking on the link below.

As part of the InnoSI project, People’s Voice Media and the Institute of Community Reporters (ICR) have been running a series of 2-Day Community Reporting for Insight programmes across Europe to capture user voice on the topics and themes from the social investment case studies being examined in the project. On these programmes, participants have captured their own and their peers’ accounts of their lived experiences using the video and audio recording functions on portable technology such as smartphones and tablets.

The stories gathered were on topics such as family life, employment, education, and integration into society. These user-created stories not only provide a diverse range of ‘bottom-up’ insights about people’s lived experience of social investment and innovation programmes, but they also give information about the wider contexts of their lives, the challenges that they face and their hopes and aspirations.

These stories were then curated and the key findings from this process were presented back as a geo-map, short summative reports and video edits. Find out more about the role of Community Reporting by watching the video below.

People’s Voice Media have been commissioned by Advancing Quality Alliance (AQuA) to run 7 Community Reporting for Co-Production projects across the North West. As part of these projects, young people were trained as Community Reporters and tasked them with gather their own, other young people’s, their parents and professionals’ experiences of transition in different healthcare services. With the stories gathered, the young Reporters worked with one of our Trainers to edit them in short films that created a dialogue on transition amongst the different perspectives captured.

The short films gather people’s experiences of the transition services in areas such as mental health, epilepsy and diabetes. The stories and films helped professionals to understand better the needs of young people and their families in transition and use this knowledge to enhance their transition process further. You can take a look at one of the films made on young people’s experience of moving on into adult mental health services by clicking the link below.

User involvement runs through the heart of the Innovative Social Investment: Strengthening communities in Europe (InnoSI) project, and the core aim of Work Package 5 (ran by People’s Voice Media) was to gather ‘User Voice’ on a range of social investment and innovation programmes from across Europe. ‘Stories of Social Investment and Innovation’ is a summative report from Work Package 5: User Voice.

Using Community Reporting practices, we worked with 11 different ‘User Voice’ groups from across 10 countries (Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK) and supported people to tell their stories in relation to topics such as family life, unemployment, education, and integration into society.

These user-created stories not only provide a diverse range of ‘bottom-up’ insights about people’s lived experience of social investment and innovation programmes, but they also give information about the wider contexts of their lives, the challenges that they face and their hopes and aspirations. The report documents the activities of the work package, in relation to the methodological approach taken in the project and findings from the analysis of the stories gathered.