Since September 2023 we’ve been working with the fabulous folk at Ideas Alliance and Curators of Change in the West Midlands as part of a Lottery funded project called – Not Another Co-Production Project. This is a 3-year project exploring how we can develop coproduction in ways that benefit local people, professionals, and organisations across England. A key aim of this work is to move co-production from a buzz word into an embedded practice within grassroots organisations across England to ensure that people have a better life.

In this second year of the project, we’ve been focusing our energies on the West Midlands and the People’s Voice Media team have been busy equipping people and organisations with Community Reporting skills to help them harness the power of lived experience stories in their work. Last Winter we delivered a series of 6 in-person workshops in Birmingham, training people in the different aspects of Community Reporting – from gathering stories to using the learning from people’s stories to effect positive social change in different community contexts. The sessions were attended by 12 people and a mixture of practical and soft skills were developed, as well as confidence-building and networking opportunities.

“I’m really enjoying every session so far, it’s given me an opportunity to really think about how we do stuff and reflect on the fact that we actually do things really well. However there are definitely areas we need to work on more which are around getting people more involved in decision making processes”

On the back of this training, one organisation has already been successful in securing 2 funding bids – whoop whoop!

To support people to use these skills in their work post-training, we set-up an initial series of small group mentoring sessions – helping people to embed what they’ve learned into their own contexts. These peer learning spaces provided help to people and organisations as they set-up their projects, and promoted the sharing the of learning and ideas. One person noted that, the sessions have “empowered me to share best practice and give examples” and another said that the sessions were “well structured and interesting – each session built on the previous one”. There are some areas of these sessions that we’d like to improve though such as running them over a longer period of time and opening them up to more people. We will be taking these ideas forward in year three as we move the project to Greater London.

More updates on this work will follow!

For the past six week, people from across Greater Manchester have been taking part in the Changing Futures Community Reporter Training Programme.

PVM have partnered with Greater Manchester Combined Authority to deliver a series of eight workshops as part of the project. So far we have covered the core aspects of community reporting, and people have started to gather and upload stories to the Community Reporter Website. 

The end goal of the project is to gather stories of peoples lived experiences of multiple disadvantage, specifically from people whose voices are often not listened to. GMCA plans to use these voices to improve the range of support services available to communities across Greater Manchester. In the process, people will be upskilled in Community Reporting and by the end of the project will be experienced enough to conduct their own story gathering projects in their own communities.

Over the course of the first 4 sessions, participants developed a basic understanding of community reporting. They learned interview techniques, digital literacy skills and explored their understanding of ‘multiple disadvantage’ in the context of their own lives experiences. 

“Being around the team and learning – it’s good to open up“

A group member reflecting on what they’ve enjoyed in the sessions.

For the past two weeks the group have been out gathering stories in their own communities – take a look at the Community Reporter website to view some of them!

“There’s not just me going through what I am going through”

A group member reflecting on what they’ve learnt during the sessions.

For the remaining four sessions, the group will review the stories they have gathered, picking out the key themes and learning points. They will then learn how these findings can be shared more widely and used as tools for creating positive social change – hopefully putting these techniques into practice.

Stay tuned for more updates on the Changing Futures Community Reporting Project!

In a world of increasing uncertainty and complexity, foresight and future thinking techniques can act as a key tool in the innovation of policy development, bringing citizens and decision-makers together to define solutions about our shared futures (Fox, 2020). As part of EUARENAS we’ve been working with social media signals to explore the future of democracy across Europe.

Social media provides a window into current debates, social issues and topics pertinent to communities. Whilst the presentation of such content is not necessarily a reflection of society, and like traditional media representations is more of a refracted view on current trends rather than a mirror image, it is still a valuable source material for understanding society. Social media accounts, particularly those associated with civil society and social movements can provide us with signs of what issues and debates are pertinent to people (as opposed to institutions) and simultaneously offer a glimpse of emerging trends in the social sphere. Such content can be useful for hypothesising over the future of our world.   

The results of this work are still being analysed and will feed into an insight briefing that we will launch later in the year about the future of democracy across Europe… however, we’ve turned the methodology we used for this work into a handy toolkit to help researchers, practitioners and policymakers work with social media content to explore the future of topics pertinent to their worlds.

This toolkit uses social media posts combined with elements of the Delphi method and policy stress testing approaches to explore future trends in society and the policy environments needed for potential future scenarios. The toolkit is underpinned by theoretical and conceptual framings of foresight practices. However, they are presented in a manner than enables them to be practically applied and implemented as a means of engaging experts from across policy, practice and research in conversations about the future.  Included within the toolkit are step-by-step instructions that outline how the research tasks can be implemented, alongside templates and tips. 

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to go to Valladolid in Spain to get together with our European partners on the Narratives of Impact project. Valladolid is charming old University city, and it houses one of the partners and the host for this transnational partnership meeting, Fundación INTRAS.

Fundación INTRAS is a non-profit organisation dedicated to research and intervention in mental health in the region of Castilla y León, Spain. 

The meeting was held so we could review the video guides that we have produced for the final toolkit and decide on final decisions for the final edit. But we also had the opportunity to –

• meet with stakeholders who are linking into the project 
• explore more creative storytelling activities 
• look at Quality Indicators that help us have a framework to measure success against.

One stakeholder is Abi Horsfield from Collective Encounters, UK. She brought some creative energy along and shared some different creative activities and methods that can be used to help measure impact. Encouraging ‘active listening’ with an activity called Concentric Circles this helped us to really consider the questions that we ask and how well we listen.

Elisha Chiesa from the Consorzio Comunità Brianza in Italy, showed us an interesting presentation about the important EPPICA project that she is working on. And we also heard from Maria from Zamora Rehabilitation Centre outside Valladolid, who showed us a film about how they have been using lived experience storytelling to support their work.

The energy and interest from these stakeholders have emboldened the project and demonstrated how relevant the toolkit and video guides that we are producing are. It’s great to have feedback and interest from other proactive organisations that are doing such important work.

As well as having the contributions from stakeholders we also explored the best way to use Quality Indicators and how to embed this when measuring impact using storytelling. We looked at what specific Quality Indicators each partner organisation would use to measure success against helping each organisation to build a Quality Indicator framework in which to measure success against.

Over the 2 days in the daytime, we were busy being developing creative and robust ways to measure impact, in the evening we were entertained by the fantastic Christmas lights that were throughout the streets of the city and were all lit by solar led lighting. This added a touch of festive magic to the whole experience without adding to climate emergency. What a delight.

Kath Peters – PVM Narratives of Impact project manager

@COSV, @CRN, @digitalstorytelling, @erasmusplus, @INTRAS, @livedexperience, @measuringimpact, @narrativesofimpact, @SNDE, #communityreporting, #livedexperiencestorytelling, @collectiveencounters

Over the past couple of years we’ve been working with Gordon Moody to gather people’s experiences of overcoming gambling addictions. The team at Gordon Moody are dedicated to providing support and treatment for gambling addiction, and want to support people reclaim and rebuild their lives through recovery in a safe, supported environment.

The stories we’ve gathered explore the impact that gambling has on people’s lives, what supports people through the addiction and what people have learned along the way. Our team and Gordon Moody hope that these honest, open and very real experiences of gambling addiction help to reduce the stigma surrounding this specific form of addiction and ultimately enable more people to reach out for support when they need it.

We really appreciate people’s time and bravery in coming forward and sharing their experiences with us. Take a look at this playlist of extracts from people’s stories to find out more…