CoSIE Horizon 2020

From probation services in the UK, unemployment provision in Spain, rural development initiatives in Estonia and many more, over the past three years the People’s Voice Media team have been busy working on the CoSIE H2020 project, using insight storytelling strategies combined with curation and story mobilisation processes to the voices of citizens to decision-making processes and enhance public services for the people who access them.

This piece of applied research has been exploring how public services across Europe and across different sectors can be co-created and has taken place across projects in Poland, Estonia, Spain, Hungary, The Netherlands, Italy, the UK, Sweden, Greece and Finland.

Our Role

As part of this work, we’ve been using Community Reporting and lived experience more generally to support the design, implementation and on-going evaluation of the pilots and now at the mobilisation stage of this work, we’ve packaged some of these gathered insight stories together into two playlists for you to watch, one, a playlist of thematic edits where you can see how each pilot country focused on different services and co-creation topics and a second playlist of extracts from individual stories.

These videos are from lived experience stories of citizens, professionals and wider stakeholders involved in the project’s activities.

You can find out more about the project itself here: https://cosie.turkuamk.fi/cosie/

View the THEMATIC EDIT PLAYLIST HERE

View the EXTRACTS PLAYLIST HERE

Community Conversations

Recently People’s Voice Media have been working with a team on the ‘Community Conversations’ project which was commissioned by For Housing and delivered by a consortium of independent organisations led by Ideas Alliance across Salford, Stockbridge Village and Fitton Hill. 

As part of the project, the consortium has been busy working with staff, tenants, and the wider community to better understand people’s needs around wellbeing.

A key part of this has been gathering and telling stories of lived experience within these communities to find out more about life in the area and what matters to residents.

A wide variety of topics came up through the Community Conversations project including what life is like for communities living in each area, the impact of Covid-19 and the theme of technology and communication which ran through many of the wellbeing stories that were gathered by Community Reporters.

Like communities all over the country, the residents of Fitton Hill, Salford and Stockbridge Village have been hit hard by the effects of the pandemic and the resulting lockdowns. Lockdown has been a negative and difficult experience for many people and the isolation and lack of social contact has impacted upon their wellbeing.

Through their stories, people described how digital tools were enabling them to stay connected with loved ones, make new connections with neighbours and switch to new ways of working, particularly during the COVID-19 lockdowns. However, they also told us that constantly using these tools – for work and socialising – can be draining and raised concerns over barriers to accessing technology.

The stories also reveal how people have adapted their ways of working and socialising, and continued to support one another throughout the crisis. Many of the stories tell us that they believe the pandemic has actually brought them closer to their neighbours and we’re looking forward to hearing more from the full reports soon!

In the meantime, it is possible to view some short extracts from a selection of the gathered stories through the For Housing video playlist which can be found HERE

Last week I had the pleasure of spending time exploring different methodologies and practices around critical thinking and the construction and de-construction of narratives, with partners and practitioners from different European countries. This is part of an exciting European project that PVM are collaborating on, called Concrit. 

Concrits aim is to create new educational tools to train, teach and empower communities. Specifically, concentrating on critical thinking and the construction and de-construction of narratives through digital storytelling. The aim being to strengthen the self-confidence of the learners, empowering them to grow in self-confidence, find their own collective voice and to strengthen a sense for local action.

Last week’s Peer Review training was meant to take part in Berlin but for obvious reasons it was online instead. And of course, online training and co-production can’t ever take the place of being together in person, but it has to be said it was still a fruitful experience.

We used the online platform Jitsi and the virtual whiteboard application Miro Board. Jitsi was quite unpredictable, getting frozen and kicked out if the internet wavered, however, I found that once again the Miroboard was an excellent tool to collaborate on and to share information and ideas.

And share ideas, we did. We tried out a variety of practices and then applied them to real life settings and then reflected on their effectiveness. The next step is to develop them further, re-designing and adapting them to suit different settings and groups. The most effective will be chosen to add to the learning paths that we are developing.

I’m looking forward to seeing the partner again in the new year for more sharing and creating together.

Kath Peters