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.

In the Building Community Connections project, a group of support organisations wanted to develop collaborative and community-led solutions to health inequalities in Calderdale. We worked with different communities to train local people as Community Reporters who were tasked with gathering lived experience stories about health issues, experiences of the pandemic and wellbeing topics from their peer networks.

The learning from these stories has informed the commissioning of local initiatives and interventions. This way of commissioning (in a more co-productive way) was quite new for the area and was an experiment for the partners involved.

We’ve worked with the project and its partners and stakeholders to capture the learning from this process. This short video summarises the key findings from this learning journey and experimental approach to commissioning and addressing health inequalities at a local level. Take a look!

Over the past 6 months PVM have been working with Creative Minds and the Mental Health Museum, on a project looking into people’s lived experience with mental health.

A multitude of sessions have taken place across West Yorkshire, specifically in Wakefield and Huddersfield, sharing Community Reporting techniques and providing the opportunity for people to share their stories.

The project initially set out to speak to people who had a connection to the former Stanley Royd Hospital and Fieldhead Hospital, something which we were able to achieve. Head over to the Community Reporter Website to take a look through and listen to some of the stories that have been recorded as part of the project so far – including accounts from former staff members of the hospitals! What also emerged from the project was a wider collection of stories exploring people’s personal mental health journeys.

We’d like to give a huge thank you to the MHM, Creative Minds and of course everyone who took the time to share their stories and take part in the Community Reporter training sessions.

Whilst PVM’s involvement in the project will shortly be coming to an end – if you want to find out more or contribute your story get in touch with the MHM.

Last month EUARENAS partners came together for two days of training led by PVM at FACT, Liverpool.

Over the two days representatives from PVM, CRN, UEF, SWPS and the pilot cities of Gdask, Voru and Reggio Emilia engaged in a series of creative workshops, providing insight into how future scenarios can be explored using interactive play style activities. Each activity was geared towards getting groups to work collectively to imagine a future in which deliberative democracy has been achieved.

Serious Play

Groups used ‘Lego’ style building blocks to construct their vision of the future.

Collaging / Annotation

Groups worked together to create an annotated collage containing imagery and text cut out of newspapers, magazines and other printed media.

Photo Voice

Groups were provided with an instant camera, then instructed to take to the streets and capture images which represented participatory democracy. They returned to the workshop after gathering their pictures and created a visual mind map of what their future scenario could look like.

The activities were really fun to take part in and each group was able to sample each of the methods, with new ideas emerging at every stage. Following this section of the training partners reflected on each of the activities discussing the positive, negatives and potential adaptations – in preparation for the delivery of a series of future thinking workshops which are set to take place over the coming months.

On the second day partners worked within their country teams to produce an action plan for the delivery of the future thinking workshops. These plans were then peer reviewed and will now be utilised to achieve the next steps of the project.

Check out the blog post over on the EUARENAS website to find out even more about what we got up to.

We are thrilled to announce that the findings of the ‘What is the value of co-production?’ project are now live.

You can:

• Watch a video summary of the findings from our Community Reporting (7 mins)
• Read the overview report (10 pages, 15 mins)
• Read the full report (80 pages, a couple of hours but so worth it!)
• Watch the YouTube playlist of fantastic extracts from all of the storytellers

None of these amazing resources would have been possible without all of the people who shared their stories with us. We are so grateful for their time and the insights that have shaped this important bit of research.

And there’s more…

There were also some other strands to this research that you might be interested in. All the details are on this webpage: What is the value of co-production?

This includes:

• An overview video of whole project
• Interactive summary PDF of whole project
  • A screen reader friendly version – as a Word document and as a PDF document.
  • An audio version – as a MP4 file
  • Versions of the Interactive summary in Braille, EPUB, MOBI – via a Google Drive folder
• As well as the Community Reporting findings, this also includes the results of the Gobby survey, a rapid critical review and learning from pilot projects.

We hope that this resources and research findings are useful to you – and please do share widely.

And look out for more coming soon – there will be the launch of a resource library for co-production and much more besides! Watch this space!