On Wednesday PVM hosted a Knowledge Exchange Event at Gorse Hill studios in Stretford, Greater Manchester, as part of the CONTINUE Project.

Young people, youth workers, staff from Gorse Hill and other community organisations came together to discover the learnings from the project so far and develop policy recommendations to benefit the lives of young people.

“Living in an area that sees lots of tourists – what’s here for us?”

During the workshop, groups worked together to brainstorm ideas and create a vision for what they’d like to see in their community in the form of community maps. These ideas are going to feed into a policy briefing which will summarise the findings of the session and set out a clear list of recommendations to local decision makers.

Some key themes that emerged from the discussions include…

• Parks and public spaces lack facilities for older young people (aged 13+) – equipment should be installed to make these spaces more inviting to this age bracket e.g. a skate park, parkour course or outdoor gym equipment
• Litter is an issue in the local area – providing more bins would improve this problem
• Poorly lit streets & areas can be scary for young people – having more streetlights would help young people feel safer
• Local stadiums and venues attract tourists and visitors from outside of the community who don’t always respect the local area – what can be done to provide people with a space they feel is built for the local community

Outside of the project, Gorse Hill Studios have scheduled to meet with local MP Kate Green to discuss how they can continue to work on influencing policy change in their community. They have also been invited to take part in a project – PLACEHOLDERS – which is looking into how young people’s voices can be included in the co-design and creation of spaces in the area like Stretford Mall.

It looks as though the work that has been done so far will continue to develop into the future – stay tuned for further updates and the release of the policy briefing!

Earlier this year, Manchester Metropolitan University’s (MMU) Policy Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU) were contracted to evaluate the Kirklees Better Outcomes Partnership (KBOP) and Greater Manchester Better Outcomes Partnership (GMBOP) programmes. As part of this evaluation, they partnered with People’s Voice Media, who have used the Community Reporting methodology to allow people who access aspects of KBOP and GMBOP’s support to share their experiences of the programme. These stories provided insights into current practice and how services might be improved and, where relevant, the insights were mapped to outcomes in a Theory of Change produced with PERU for both KBOP (Fig. 1) and GMBOB (Fig. 2).

KBOP

KBOP was launched in September 2019, commissioned by Kirklees Council. The service is for people at risk of homelessness. They take a person-centred approach, tailoring their support to individuals who access their services, which offer support across four main areas: housing, health and wellbeing, education and employment, and support with domestic violence.

The stories gathered from people who use KBOP’s services focused on the areas of mental health, education and employment, and the importance of the person-centred approach. They show that the service is achieving many of its aims and that its person-centred approach has been warmly received. In fact, several storytellers say there is nothing that needs to be done to improve the service. In which case, the main recommendation for KBOP going forward would be to keep providing its service without stagnating – keep doing what works but be open to changes to allow it to meet more outcomes.

GMBOP

GMBOP is a social enterprise set up to co-produce and deliver the Greater Manchester Youth Homelessness Prevention Programme. This is a 4-year programme targeting young homeless people in Greater Manchester. It is referred to locally as ‘Pathfinder’.

Some key points from across the stories are:

• The young people’s experiences of the service has been positive both in terms of their interactions with the professionals working in the service and the impact it has had on their lives
• When compared to other similar services, Pathfinder is seen as being more suitable for the young people due to (a) the person-centred approach and (b) how it helps them navigate challenges to accessing different forms of support
• The young people are reassured by the support they are receiving and suggest that it will be key preventing a return to homelessness

We have produced our findings for this project in full in a series of reports, and there is also a feature article on the Community Reporter website that goes into detail around the benefits of the person-centred approach of both KBOP and GMBOP.

We’ve been working on how to present our social impact and learnings for a few years now. Our first big attempt for the year 2019/20 felt all wrong and too numbers-based for an organisation that works with lived experience storytelling. Last year’s report was a lot better after we piloted using reflective storytelling as our main impact-measurement tool and we felt it better reflected People’s Voice Media and the work we do.

This year, for the 2021/22 report, we have built on this even further after realising that it wasn’t really a social impact report at all, but more an annual report of our learnings as an organisation. We still look at impact through reflective storytelling, but we use this as a tool to identify learnings and work out how to put these into action.

Today we are releasing our Annual Learning Report 2021/22 into the world, but we have already begun pulling out learnings and creating a plan of action in order to put them into practice. This is something we are reviewing every quarter and, as such, we hope to make this a working document that’s useful to not only People’s Voice Media, but also our partners and others who work with lived experience storytelling.

So, without further ado, here is our Annual Learning Report… Let us know what you think!

For those who prefer to listen to an audio summary of the report, you can do so here:

Early this year we shared with you, the start of our journey to become actively anti-racist. If you want a little reminder of this, take a look at this blog post. Since then we’ve been continuing both our learning and action, and so we thought we’d do another little update.

So, what have we been learning, exploring or reflecting on?

A colleague at Disability Rights UK shared with us the Home Truths: Undoing racism and delivering real diversity in the charity sector report. As the report states:

The charity sector has a problem with racial and ethnic diversity. Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic (BAME) people are under-represented in the sector and those who are in charities can be subject to racism and antagonism not faced by white colleagues.

It contains a set of recommendations aimed at the sector, funders, individual charities and leaders within charities that can help in addressing systemic racism within the charity arena. As a team, we’ve looked through the recommendations and identified what we are already doing to contribute to the recommendations for change and what actions we could be taking. We are now using this to help us develop an anti-racism strategy or theory of change (or sorts) that will help us identify outcomes around diversity, equity and inclusion and the route to achieving them. We are hoping to be able to share this with you in Autumn. 

Some of the ideas for the future include, (1) using our social media more actively to engage in or start conversations about anti-racism, (2) developing a complaints procedure specifically for incidents of racism and ensuring it encompasses not just the ‘team’ but is something that people who access our events and workshops can utilised if needed to and (3) look at and utilise what training or mentoring from specialists in this area is available. 

What’s already changed or is changing…

So, since our last blog we’ve changed the way we do things and started to put things into practice. These include:

• Testing out different ways of recruiting that are more about finding folk who align themselves to our values and mission, rather than who – as the Home Truth’s report states – “can hit the ground running”. 
• Creating a shared bookshelf (in a digital format) of things to read, watch or listen to that could educate us and inform our thinking around racism. We’ve also purchased some books and webinars on this, and are sharing them around layers of our team. 
• Seeking funding to support our work in this arena – in particular, in addressing the whiteness of co-production and research spaces. We haven’t yet been successful in this – but fingers crossed for the future. 
• Acknowledging the whiteness of the spaces we are involved in and projects we work on with partners and actively supporting people from Black and racially minoritized communities access such spaces and be involved in setting the agenda of the conversation. 
• Providing financial support from our current funding and earned income to increase the diversity of people who can access and participate in our events and trainings – such as the annual Community Reporter Conference. 
• Paying attention to the details of our ‘events’ such as choice of music and food, so that they speak to different cultures.  

As ever, we welcome critical reflections and challenge to our actions. Also, if you’d like to suggest any reading material, podcasts and other things, let us know! Equally, if you’re doing work in this area and want to share what’s working for you, then feel free to send a message and start a conversation.

People’s Voice Media and the Community Reporter Network have teamed up with the Co-Production Collective as part of a UKRI funded project to gather people’s experiences of co-production. We will then be using these stories and working with the storytellers (people with lived experience of co-production) to identify what changes co-production can bring to services, research, and policy.

So, what is co-production? 

The Co-Production Collective define it as:

an approach to working together in equal partnership and for equal benefit. For us, this means living our core values. These values – challenging, human, inclusive, transparent – are central to everything we do.

Why are we doing this?

We want to have a deeper understanding of the value of co-production and use this insight from people’s everyday experiences of co-production to support the implementation and use of co-production as a means of change in the areas of services, research, and policy. We also want to acquire a deeper knowledge and understanding of co-production from a wide range of individuals and community perspectives so that we can us it in our own work.

How have we gathered the stories?

We started our research with an open call for contributors, including people with lived experience, professionals, researchers, policymakers to sharing individual stories or group stories of co-production. To gather the stories, we’ve used our Community Reporting method… more on that here:

We matched those that were interested in sharing their stories of co-production with three members of our team who all have first-hand experience of co-producing in a variety of settings. People groups that expressed an interest in sharing their stories were invited to a 30-minute conversation about co-production over Zoom… with a few conversations also being held in-person.

 What questions did we ask?

Our ‘conversation starters’ were:

• Can you share with me an experience of co-production?
• We are interested in exploring what worked well and what didn’t.
• We’d also like to know what changes the co-production process helped to create and what impact you feel the impact – positive or negative – that the co-production process has had on people, groups, organisations, services, society etc?

From here, the conversations went in their own unique directions!

How will we use the stories?

Once we have gathered all the stories, we will use them to create:

• An online story archive hosted on the Institute of Community Reporters website – bringing people’s stories together so they can be watched and shared online.
• A findings report that summarises the key learning from all the different stories.
• A YouTube playlist containing short, edited extracts from each of the stories, with subtitles.

We’ve also been running some participatory workshops with different people to help us create these outputs and findings. They should be ready for October 2022 and released publicly! 

And, the story won’t end here. We will continue to explore what we have learned and use this to affect change in different places. As a community and project, we are keen to use these insights to not only further our own knowledge and skill around co-production, but are hopeful that these insights show that co-production is something that can make a difference not only to individual lives but to research, services, and policy.