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.

The CONTINUE Project is continuing apace and the partners across Europe have recently completed a series of interviews with stakeholders, both local and pan-European.

The stakeholder groups were made up of decision-makers and policy-makers whose roles include and interest in or effect on young people e.g. local politicians, educators, health and social care workers, youth workers etc. The interviews were designed to get feedback from stakeholders on the project’s findings so far, as well as garner their insights on what they perceive to be the issues affecting young people in the wake of the pandemic.

Interestingly, and gratifyingly, the insights of the stakeholders largely align with the project’s recent findings. You can read the local synthesis reports here, and the pan-European synthesis report here. Both reports are in note form as they are being used to plan our series of knowledge exchange events across Europe.

The UK’s knowledge exchange will take place at Gorse Hill Studios on Wednesday 21st September 2022 at 4.30pm. Anyone can attend, from young people to stakeholders and members of the community. You’ll discuss the findings of the project so far and your discussions will inform the policy recommendations that we will be putting forward in the next stage of the project. You can register for the event here.

You may also wish to save the date for our pan-European knowledge exchange, which will be held online on Monday 14th November 2022. Time and registration link to follow.

NARRATIVES OF IMPACT PROJECT – CO-CREATING A NEW VIDEO GUIDE TOOLKIT WITH EU PARTNERS IN BERLIN

Getting together with our European partners on the Narratives of Impact project is always interesting, productive and dare I say it, fun.

The last meeting we had in Berlin in May was all of the above and more. As part of the project, we are co-creating video guides to go into a ‘toolkit’ for Third Sector organisations to use storytelling as a way of measuring impact. 

In Berlin we ran a ‘living lab’. This is where we test and try approaches and methodologies out. This living lab focused on planning the video guides to be ready to film in July – September.

We spent 2 days at the Atelier Talk Studio. This is an art and design studio and it was certainly the right environment to get creative and to visualise the video guides. Together we worked on scripts, storyboards and generally planned the video production. Leon, one of PVM’s tech wizards joined us online and gave everyone a super presentation in the do’s and don’ts of video production. 

Challenges we have with co-creating video guides in this way are ensuring that they have a consistent design and look. Getting together to plan is a way to check that we are all on the same page.

It was satisfying to come away with a sense of achievement and know that we are all ready, nearly, to start to film.

Kath Peters – PVM Narratives of Impact project manager

Back in May, the EUARENAS project held its first Community of Practice (CoP) in-person session as part of a project meeting in Reggio Emilia. The CoP is made-up of folk from research, services, policy and communities across Europe and the group is interested in learning and developing their knowledge about how democracy works in local communities, and how citizens (in the broadest sense of the term – i.e., people who live in a place) and communities can be more involved in local democracy. As part of this session, we delivered an introductory activity that looked at the future of democracy in Europe – this blog shares with you some of the ideas from this session…

Democracy Now

When reflecting on what democracy feels like where they live and work, the CoP members noted points such as:

• Citizens feel removed from the political process – they perhaps don’t care or feel powerless to affect change 
• There was a sense that ‘European identity’ is being diminished 
• Growing complexity administration and bureaucracy causing blockages and disconnect 
• Truth and trust doesn’t feel valued 

A key question being posed, was is democracy really working? Are current structures really supporting the practice or principles of social equality – or are they unwittingly helping maintain inequalities? 

The future we’d like to see

Given that some of the points above point to a ‘crisis in democracy’, CoP members had some interesting ideas about how this could look very different. These ideas included:

• Citizens having more agency and involvement in democracy – moving to ‘deep democracy’, going beyond just voting and being involved in deliberation and decision-making 
• Having a ‘value-driven’ democracy 
• Local government with the competencies to support new ways of working with citizens and involving them in local democracy

Ideas for getting there

So, given that the CoP members would like to changes from the current situation, we spent some time thinking about how we might get there. Thinking and suggestions in this area were:

• Mainstreaming of existing practices such as participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, crowdsourced law – so that these become the new ‘status quo’
• Adopting test and learn approaches as a way that experimentation can be done and actively learned from
• Find ways of celebrating and connecting up the small changes that are taking place – this will help people see that progress is being made, even when it feels like things are changing too slow

The full results of this workshop will be combined with more detailed work done with residents of different cities across Europe to produce an insight briefing focusing on how people across Europe are currently experiencing democracy and their ideas for the future.

This will be released in Autumn 2022 – watch this space!