For a number of years, Johan Flyckt has been using people’s stories to impact on the way in which social housing services are provided in Sweden. Using Community Reporting methodologies, Johan has been using the lived experiences of people to impact on decision makers around important issues. And it is this impact that the Our Voices project seeks to build on.

Opening the fourth transnational partnership meeting for the Our Voices project, Johan reflected on the barriers he had encountered in getting people’s voices to be heard – an issue that is pertinent to this project. He discussed how he had used real voices and stories in reports and films to help influence the way that things are done in his work place. This gave the Our Voices partnership much food for thought and discussion… setting the collaborative learning tone of the meeting.

Over the last six months, the Our Voices team, led by People Voice Media, has designed a 5-day training-the-trainer course on story curation. This meeting provided partners with a good opportunity to discuss the first draft of this curriculum and offer feedback, suggestions and adaptations based on their expertise and cultural understandings. Based on this feedback, the training programme is currently being finalized ready for its launch in September, where in the hosting city of Berlin it will be piloted with a pan-European group of trainers. More news about the training course and the project – coming soon!

As part of the CoSIE project, Valènciactiva is working with the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) to co-design and pilot a new business creation and development scheme with a variety of stakeholders. To kick-start this process, People’s Voice Media trained staff members from Valènciactiva and UPV in Community Reporting for Insight Methods which were used as part of their first co-creation workshop.

Within the workshop a range of stakeholders – from NGOs to members of regional government, business mentors to unemployed people – used storytelling to share their experiences of supporting people back into employment or how they have been supported to get back into employment themselves. With these stories, the stakeholders used the experiences of people in the room to generate ideas for the business creation and development programme. Core ideas that emerged were the need for empathy from service providers and to better connect existing provision to meet the needs of users.

Following this workshop, the Valènciactiva and UPV staff worked with People’s Voice Media to curate the stories and ideas from the co-creation workshop into a synthesis of findings and emergent suggestions for the co-design phase of the pilot. Watch the behind-the-scenes video below to find out more!

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.