This is our fourth blog in a series about how Community Reporting has been used as a tool for co-creation in the CoSIE project. In this blog post, we wanted to share with you some of the learning from applying Community Reporting as a tool for reflection, and explore some of our successes and challenges during this process…

In the CoSIE project, Community Reporting has been used as a tool that encourages introspective reflection to support co-evaluation processes, providing opportunities for different stakeholders to explore what is working/valued, what is not working/valued, and future directions and sustainability. Some of the key strengths in using Community Reporting in this way have been:

• It supports introspection in a quick and accessible manner, and can support people’s individual self-development as well as the development of services.
• It can be applied at different moments in a co-creation process to provide on-going learning and development, rather than just summative evaluation.
• It supports active and deep listening that helps people to better understand different perspectives and situations.

Speaking about Community Reporting as a tool for reflection, the Spanish pilot identified that the unemployed people they are working with to set-up their own businesses used Community Reporting to become more “conscious about their journey” and could better seen their own development. Similarly, the Hungarian pilot found that it helped the families involved in their household economies project “articulate their minds on their present and previous situations”. This was achieved at both a “surface and also on a deeper level“.

A potential limitation of the method as a tool for reflection is that you cannot always guarantee that people will share their reflections consistently over a period of time. For example, as the Community Reporters gather and share their own stories voluntarily they can choose when to contribute and when not to. This makes it difficult, but not impossible, to do a longitudinal style reflection.

In the next blog post in this series, we will explore the impact that Community Reporting has had as part of the CoSIE project, and if you want to read the introductory blog in this series or the previous ones on how we’ve used Community Reporting as a tool for insight or a tool for dialogue, then click on the links.