During Refugee Week in June (19 – 23) there will be significant events across the North of England where the personal stories of migrants and refugees living in the UK will be heard.

The stories have been collected as part of a Heritage Lottery project running in the North of England. The project is managed by Peoples Voice Media and aims to preserve and archive current stories of migration to the UK over the past 10 years.  From these stories there will be the creation of; an educational toolkit, a database of local new articles and an animation, to share with communities so people can gain a better understanding of the current position of migrants and refugees. These resources will give communities the tools to help to build communities of sanctuary.

Peoples Voice Media have been working with Refugee Women Connect in Liverpool, LASSN in Leeds, Global Link in Lancaster, Dragons Voice in Manchester, MAP in Middlesbrough and using peer-to-peer Community Reporting have gathered lived experience stories as well as undertaking archive research and collected local newspaper stories from the past 10 years. 

There will be 5 in-person events in each area Lancaster, Middlesbrough, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester to look at the stories gathered during Community Reporting workshops, as well as reviewing key themes from the archive research activities.

The aim of these events is to bring people together from each area; members of the wider local community, cultural and heritage organisations, to explore the findings of the workshops and research. The events seek to open-up a dialogue between different local people about the heritage of migration in their area, how that relates to their current thinking and perceptions and what can be done to better understand, learn from and preserve this type of heritage in the future.

The theme of refugee Week this year is compassion, and this certainly resonates with some of the stories we have heard from participants on the project who have found the British people very welcoming.

“I’m very happy because we met here very nice people, very kind people.’ Karina, Lancaster.

If you’d like to find out more, please reserve your free space by completing the Eventbrite booking forms below:

Monday 19th June: 12:00pm to 3:00pm – Lancaster

Tuesday 20th June: 12:00pm to 3:00pm – Middlesbrough

Wednesdav 21st June: 12:00pm to 3:00pm – Leeds

Thursday 22nd June: 12:00pm to 3:00pm – Liverpool

Friday 23rd June: 12:00pm to 3:00pm – Manchester

Or get in touch with Kath Peters at People Voice Media at kath@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk

We have been working away at an exciting EU project called Narratives of Impact since September 2020 and last month we had our penultimate meeting in the fabulous city of Milan. The partners from Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain and myself (UK) got together to finalise the video guides that we have made to go along with a toolkit created for NGO’s, charities, and voluntary organisations to use storytelling to measure impact.

The toolkit is designed to help organisations, teams and individuals to use storytelling to to see what is working and what needs to be improved. Applying storytelling methods can really help to improve data collection and more importantly help improve services and delivery. Using different storytelling methods can help people to engage with data collection and learning processes in a creative way, enhancing inclusion and access, as well as interest and commitment. 

Each partner has worked hard over the past few months to create their own video guide and it was great to watch the final videos together whilst eating delicious Milanese pizzas. Marco from @COSV hosted us in the COSV offices in Milan and gave us a warm welcome. It was good to meet the staff and see where they do their important work.

The next step in the project is translating the toolkit into Italian, German, Spanish and Polish ready to be published in June.

Kath Peters, project manager, PVM.

The Home? Project was set up last year to create a space to give Migrants, Refugees and Asylum seekers a voice to speak about their lived experiences in Northern England with the view to change the narratives that surround migrant communities. The project hopes to serve as a vehicle to drive the message home that things need to change for the better. Common themes and key findings from the stories will be created as an animated film and distributed in the wider community such as schools, colleges, universities, museums, libraries, informal education settings, councils, community groups and grassroot organisations.

These stories have been gathered through using PVM’s methodology of Community Reporting and Archive Research training.

PVM has partnered with 5 crucial partner organisations spread across the Northern region to train volunteers to become Community Reporters and begin the story gathering / sensemaking process.

We kicked off our first community reporter sessions last year in October with Refugees Women’s Connect based in Liverpool and completed the Community Reporter training at the end of February with Methodist Asylum Project in Middlesbrough.

There’s been a variety of stories and feedback shared from people that convey many different challenges and successes when entering the UK. For example, as English is not the native tongue for most people migrating to the UK, it has been difficult to find work or know where to turn to get appropriate advice and direction. However, people found that the longer they have stayed in the country, they have met other people in the same or similar position through charity organisations and have made friends and received knowledge on steps to take to get educated into English culture. They become familiar with the organisations that have been setup to help aid migrant communities. With these developments, some of our volunteers have reported that their experience has become more positive over time as they learn the language and expand their knowledge and communities.

With government coming down hard on migrants and bringing in new legalisation that will make a migrant’s life even harder, it is crucial that the lived experiences of migrants in the UK are heard and action taken to improve their lives and well-being.

In 2021, People’s Voice Media embarked on the CONTINUE Project, which sought to support young people experiencing social exclusion to tackle the specific challenges of post-COVID times in terms of staying connected and integrated into European communities. The project was delivered by a consortium of 8 NGOs from different European countries, experienced in youth education and community- based activities. The work involved storytelling, social action projects, policy development, knowledge exchanges, an outreach campaign and the creation of an online platform, and was co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

The UK strand of the project, which People’s Voice Media has been responsible for, saw us partner with Gorse Hill Studios in Trafford, Greater Manchester, to examine the ways in which their young people had been affected by the pandemic, and co-produce ideas for ways in which they might be supported going forward.

Over the two years, the project saw us gather stories, host Conversation of Change and knowledge exchange events, produce insight reports, and recommendations for policy and practice. We’re proud that these recommendations have been taken forward by Gorse Hill to begin discussions with Trafford Council on ways in which they can work together to support local youth, and we’re proud of the project’s reach across Europe.

We’ll be following up on the lasting impact of the project over the next 12 months and will report in upcoming annual learning reports so watch this space.

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!