The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities across communities in the UK and beyond. As part of the CONTINUE Project, (a pan-European consortium of eight NGOs, co-funded by the European Union’s Erasmus+ programme) People’s Voice Media has published a policy and practice briefing, which details specifically how young people living in Trafford, Greater Manchester have been adversely affected by the global crisis.

Young people in the area are experiencing challenges with their health and wellbeing, disengagement with education and are being further disadvantaged by poverty and disability due to lack of local support. As the briefing demonstrates, at present there is significant pressure on local support provision and this is leading to young people not being able to access the support they need. Furthermore, young people’s voices (particularly those facing varying degrees of marginalisation) are not regularly present in the political or decision-making sphere on a local level.

The evidence that has contributed to this briefing includes lived experiences of young people from Trafford, interviews with local policy- and decision-makers, learnings from the application of social actions in the local area, and a knowledge exchange sessions attended by a range of local actors and stakeholders. This briefing presents specific recommendations for policy and practice intended to have long-term positive effects on young people and relates to policy areas around mental health, political engagement, and safe spaces. They demonstrate what can support young people and their communities during COVID-19 recovery, while simultaneously increasing their socio-political engagement in local governance. And although the recommendations have been written with Trafford in mind, they have the potential to be rolled out and applied at a national level.

The CONTINUE Project has also developed a pan-European policy and practice briefing with recommendations at the European level, which can be downloaded here.

We are pleased to announce that the Eventbrite booking links for the Community Reporting Online Session and Coaching Programme as part of the Not Another Co-Production project are now ready! 

The full listings are detailed below. Please book quickly as places are limited. All sessions are on Zoom and links will be provided upon booking. 

Online Sessions – These sessions are open to anyone living and or working in West Midlands

Audio recording & audio editing – #NACP Workshop

Friday 3^rd March 2023, 10:00am – 11:30am

Video recording & video editing – #NACP Workshop

Friday 10^th March 2023, 10:00am – 11:30am

Digital Tools For Co-Production #NACP Workshop

Tuesday 14th March 2023, 10:00am – 11:30am

CAPE is the Consortium Against Pain Inequalities, and they are working with People’s Voice Media on an important new project. 

The CAPE team is investigating whether exposure to adverse childhood experiences contributes to higher levels of chronic pain in the most deprived communities and the consequences of this. The interaction between the CAPE project, People’s Voice Media and the Community Reporter network will explore how lived experience stories can be used with the research.

As someone living with chronic long term pain (CLTP), I’ve found it hard to get the right holistic support and understanding for many years, so it’s wonderful to be part of this initiative. Through people’s stories about living with CLTP, we hope to help the wider health, social care, housing and Department of Work and Pensions systems that come into contact with people like me. It’s vital that these agencies understand what it’s like to live with CLTP, and what impact this has on our lives. Additionally, the dialogues and recommendations will cover what needs to change and what such changes will do for people like us.

Combining the CAPE project and our work here at People’s Voice Media is central to what I believe in. By retaining and highlighting the personal aspects of real people’s experiences, we can start to change society so that it is truly inclusive and inequalities are eradicated.

So far, we’ve had two Community Reporting workshops and we’ve collected 4  stories from Advisory Members connected with the CAPE project, plus one other person living with CTLP. We have a sense-making workshop scheduled for 6th December, when we’ll have a deeper look at what people have said, and what we can do to recommend changes that will enable people to live good lives. Here is a small selection of what people have been sharing so far:

“People need to be more tolerant. They also need to realise we are not the minority. There’s tons of us, people just don’t talk about it. ….. We judge people and how able they are through their health. And it’s apparently a badge of honour. If you’re healthy….. We need to educate on invisible conditions, but also on all the conditions that people face. And people need to be educated rather than say this is going to be something that’s going to cost me in the workplace to deal with. We need to realise how much we should value and incorporate people in the workplace that have challenges.”

“There’s a lot of fear for not being believed.”

“It’s not necessarily that the pain is for the same diagnosis, but there’s a lot of similarities and a lot of frustrations people are living with.”

“I wish that health professionals and allied health professionals would actually just listen and think. Does this person need some other kind of support as well? And treat you as a whole person.” 

People’s Voice Media will be working closely with the CAPE team to explore what the next steps need to be, and an update on the project will be shared with you all in the new year. 

Isaac Samuels, Community Reporting Lead

You can find out more about the CAPE project and other similar research projects here: https://www.ukri.org/news/new-data-hub-and-research-into-chronic-pain/ 

Disability Rights UK (DRUK) & People’s Voice Media are working in partnership to record people’s lived experience narratives and insights about the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.

As a Disabled person, and someone who lived through COVID-19 and who is living with long COVID, this partnership is so important. It is not only about ensuring the lived experiences of people like me are at the heart of the inquiry, but it’s about the inquiry hearing the truth from so many like me. Our remit was to capture the lived experiences of 12 Deaf and Disabled people, but we’ve already gone beyond that. We also have more people to share their stories and are looking for others, to ensure that we represent the variety of disability experiences across the UK.

Much like the lockdowns, hearing Disabled people’s lived experiences has been a mixture of emotions. Sometimes heartbreaking, often leading to gritted teeth and clenched fists with thoughts like

“How could this have happened? Why was common sense not used?”

Occasionally we’ve heard snippets of hope about kindness, communities and creativity. Sadly, many interviewees have not been surprised by what they and their loved ones experienced. Experiences such as the deaths of Disabled people in and outside of care homes, lack of access to food shopping and personal protective equipment (PPE) for Disabled people who were isolating and/or requiring personal care did not happen by accident. They were the result of policies and choices that have a discriminatory view of Disabled people. Examples of such policies and choices include Coronavirus (COVID-19): Guidance for the Care Act easements, issued to local authorities early in the pandemic. Additionally, there was government guidance for people receiving direct payments. 

This project will ensure the Covid Inquiry hears the experiences of Deaf and Disabled people who lived through the pandemic. It’s vital these voices are central to the Inquiry’s exploration of the inequalities and injustices people have faced. To prevent any future situation leading to injustices against Deaf and Disabled people, the COVID Inquiry, and those called before it, will have to face some profoundly uncomfortable facts. For example, how did we reach a situation requiring Disabled people to sign DNRs (Do Not Resuscitate orders) and for this to be considered acceptable? What beliefs and assumptions about the worth of Disabled people guided this way of thinking?

At the heart of the work is co-production. Once all the interviews have been done, the interviewees will be invited to a sense-making workshop in the New Year, to agree the main points and recommendations together for the COVID Inquiry. This will include positive and negative aspects of people’s experiences.  We have collated a wide range of stories to date and we’re working with DRUK to ensure we can add more stories. Additionally, we are working with DRUK to explore how we share these stories beyond the COVID Inquiry, because it’s vital that people know and remember that at the height of the pandemic and lockdowns, we were not all in it together. There were many inequalities faced by Disabled people.

We would very much like to hear from Blind people and Deaf people about their experiences during the pandemic.  Additionally, having narratives from people in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales will enable us to give the COVID Inquiry a UK-wide view. Currently our story sharers include 3 parents who have spoken on behalf of their children who have learning disabilities and who do not communicate verbally. We would also like to include the experiences of people with learning disabilities in their own words. 

The project team has been humbled by what people have shared. These stories are full of trauma, and as a project team we have had to be mindful and work in ways that mean we can support people to share their stories in a trauma-informed way. Undertaking this work, within the team itself, has helped the practice of Community Reporting and made us really think about the care and due regard we need to have in place when capturing stories. We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed so generously to this work and we will share the results with you later in the project.

Isaac Samuels, Community Reporting Lead, People’s Voice Media

In late October, we sent a Debbie and Alice – a youth worker and a young person respectively – from Gorse Hill Studios, Greater Manchester, to Copenhagen, Denmark for a training session hosted by our CONTINUE project partners, Crossing Borders.

The training was for one of the final stages of the CONTINUE project: the Reach Out Campaign. This is designed so that the young people who have co-created the project so far can disseminate their findings and begin to pave the way for the changes the project will be recommending.

The workshops delivered essential training on how to go viral by Alex Sabour, founder and CEO of Gorilla, and how to make short form content by TikTok creator, Tom Hyland. In the next stages, Crossing Borders will be producing guidelines for the Reach Out campaign and Debbie and Alice – along with their counterparts across Europe – will be training their peers and delivering their campaigns… We can’t wait!

Also upcoming in December will be our published policy and practice briefings, co-created by everyone who has participated in CONTINUE – including in our recent pan-European knowledge exchange event. Watch this space.