Members of the Camerados movement have been busy mapping out the ripples of impact their public living rooms have had on local communities.

Over the past 2 years, people have come together online to learn about Ripple Effect Mapping and share the waves of impact that have been brought about by public living rooms from Boston USA to Lochgilphead Scotland.

Public living rooms are a concept created by the Camerados movement to encourage the creation of agenda free community spaces.

Public living rooms have sofas and cuppas, maybe some tunes, maybe some board games. They are warm welcoming places with people who listen, who treat everyone the same, who don’t judge or try to fix each other.

Each public living room is different. They are not manned by staff, they are set up and organised by camerados for their communities and are open to all. And all of them use the six simple camerado ideas to underpin how they run.

Some are pop ups for short periods, some are at regular times each week and others are open daily, and you’ll find them all over the place. They’re in Sierra Leone, in the USA, in New Zealand, and all over the UK; in shopping centres, town halls, old shops, hospitals, cafes. And one day we want there to be one in every neighbourhood.

You can find out more about these over on their website and see if there’s one in your area!

Each session introduced Camerados to the concept of Ripple Effect Mapping – a visual way of marking down levels of impact in relation to community projects using simple craft materials and group discussion. The unique approach to impact measurement allows people to identify actions and changes that have occurred, capturing the often unnoticed ripples of impact that might not necessarily be noticed using more traditional approaches. Take a look at an example map above to see what kind of content is created during the REM process.

The coloured stickers you see on the paper, along with the different styles of lines all mark different aspects of change that have occurred as a result of the creation of a Public Living Room.

As part of the project we’ve spoken to over 30 Public Living Rooms from across the UK (even stretching as far the Boston in the USA!) and have heard how they have positively impacted the people who have accessed them. Whether they are providing a warm space to gather during colder months, to fostering connections between people who otherwise wouldn’t meet, the process has uncovered that even something as simple as a brew can lead to huge ripples of impact on an individual, community and societal level.

To find out more about the project and Ripple Effect Mapping methodology head over to our earlier blog post here or reach out to us on enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk

Here at People’s Voice Media we are on a mission to create a just world. We have a vision for a future in which people’s lived experience is heard, valued, and has influence.

About us

We are a charity and company limited by guarantee, founded in 1995. In 2007 we launched the Community Reporting methodology and began to build the Community Reporter Network. Community Reporting is a digital storytelling approach that supports people’s participation in research, policy-making, service development, and decision-making processes. The Community Reporter Network now spans the UK and Europe. It has 50+ active partner organisations from different sectors, and has trained over 2,000 Community Reporters. Our work puts lived experience at the heart of service improvement, policy development, and research practices.

Help us to change the world, one story at a time 

As part of this journey, we are looking to recruit 2-3 Trustees who will join an existing Board to continue to provide robust governance to the organisation and support us in achieving our strategic goals.

We are particularly interested in recruiting Trustees with skills/expertise in one or more of the following:

• Charity leadership
• Lived and/or living experience of inequalities and/or injustices 
• Strategic communications
• Human resources 
• Income generation (particularly for social enterprises/third sector organisations)

We are keen to recruit at least one Trustee who is already a part of the Community Reporter network. We would also been keen to recruit at least one Trustee who would like to progress onto a Chair role within 12 months of joining the Board. 

How to apply 

1. Read the attached document that tells you more about People’s Voice Media, Community Reporting and the Trustee role. 
2. Attend an online ‘Meet the Team and Board’ session (if you can) – email hayley@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk for an invite/link:
   • 3pm – 4pm, Tuesday 16th July 2024 
   • 3pm – 4pm, Tuesday 23rd July 2024 
3. Submit to Hayley on hayley@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk as up to 2 pages of A4 or 5 minutes of video/audio by 3pm on 16th August that answers the following questions:

• Why do you want to be a trustee at People’s Voice Media?
• What do you hope to gain from your trusteeship at People’s Voice Media?
• What do you hope to offer People’s Voice Media’s Board and the organisation?

How else you can support us

If being a Trustee isn’t right for you at the moment, please could you share this with people you think may be interested in joining us? We are keen to reach people outside of our existing network who could bring new perspectives and ideas to our work.

The EUARENAS project responds to a major European challenge – the need to strengthen legitimacy, identification and engagement within the democratic public sphere. The project investigates the ways that social movements, coupled with local reform initiatives that manifest themselves in local-level experiments, create momentum for political change that include more inclusive forms and participatory forms of governance. It nurtures active citizenship, social agendas and political life through citizen participation and democratic innovations in European cities through a range of traditional, applied, and mixed methodology research approaches.

People’s Voice Media has been leading the work package utilising foresight and future-thinking approaches as a research strand. As a tool, foresight is both a tool for understanding democratic innovations as they emerge and for engaging citizens and other actors in such innovations within the participatory and deliberative realms. EUARENAS uses mixed method approaches to foresight to investigate and hypothesize over future trends and scenarios in participatory democracies. These research activities have culminated in a Future Scenarios Report, which can be read on the EUARENAS website, and a visualisation of the EUARENAS City of the Future, which can also be viewed online. Both outputs make the recommendation that cities wanting to strive towards more equitable local democracies should:

1. Address structural barriers to participation
2. Build relationships of trust
3. Invest in formal and civic education
4. Make decisions for the long-term

We have now transformed these key learnings into policy recommendations that can be implemented at city level in order to foster legitimacy, identification and engagement within the democratic public sphere. We are excited to share these recommendations with you.

People’s Voice Media were commissioned as a learning and evaluation partner for Vision for Volunteering as they carried out the second phase of their project – which seeks to create a better future for volunteering – between April 2023 and March 2024. We followed an iterative learning structure, working collaboratively with the Vision team to make sense of the complex environment in which the Vision is operating and trying to create change. Our aim was to not only evaluate the work carried out so far, but also to create a learning strategy that the Vision team could use going forward to continuously learn as the project forges ahead. Having recently submitted our final report and strategy to the team, we have been reflecting on some of the tools we have used and how we might utilise them in order to work towards our own People’s Voice Media strategic goals.

With Vision for Volunteering, we used a combination of tools to gather data from the project itself and the wider volunteering ecosystem. These included:

• Stories of lived experience
• Ripple Effect Mapping
• Events data (spectrum lines, surveys, feedback cards, etc.)
• Statistics and KPIs from the project team

As well as analysing each data set individually, we also synthesised it under the five themes of the Vision for Volunteering project: Awareness & Appreciation, Power, Equity & Inclusion, Collaboration, and Experimentation. As the volunteering sector is complex and non-linear, and the themes are high concept, it would not make sense to use a traditional Theory of Change in order to measure the impact of the project and plan future steps. Instead, we opted for a Vector Theory of Change (VToC) in order to produce Direction of Travel maps. Directions of travel for each thematic vision were established and in each learning cycle, insights from the learning tools were plotted against the axes. The data points are then grouped together where trends emerge.  From this, in each project learning cycle, an understanding of the current state of play can be re-established. This enables the identification of adjacent possibilities within the context of the current volunteering ecosystem. These adjacent possibilities are the closest realisable next steps in how to move in the direction of travel needed to achieve the specific thematic vision. This is the compass for the strategic direction. The ensuing steps can then be followed in order to transform this into action.

This approach allows for flexibility, adjusting your plan to work with the current state of play. It also allows for the development of small steps that work towards bigger change.

As we used the VToC method for our partners, it became increasingly apparent to the People’s Voice Media team that we could benefit from this approach when working on our own strategic goals. It would give us the flexibility we need while giving us space to reflect on each learning cycle and decide on our own adjacent possibilities. Inspired by our work on this project, we will be seeking to use a VToC in our next Annual Learning Report (to be published later this year) and make it an integral part of our strategy work going forward.

We’re very excited about this development in our learning and look forward to sharing the outcomes.

Since May 2023, People’s Voice Media has been in its second year as the learning partner for Camerados, helping them to uncover the impact of their Public Living Rooms (including what is working well and what isn’t) through a blend of lived experience storytelling and Ripple Effect Mapping.

Ripple Effect Mapping is an evaluation tool that we are using more and more frequently at People’s Voice Media. It is a participatory impact evaluation technique, originating in community development work, and the approach captures ‘ripples’ of impact that are hard to measure by traditional methods – including potential impacts that haven’t been fully realised yet. The Ripple Effect Maps were produced in a participatory online workshop environments where groups were asked to reflect on the direct and indirect impacts of Public Living Rooms that they have seen and/or organised. They then mapped these on paper as ‘change journeys’ (i.e., A led to B that led to C etc.) creating a ‘chain reaction’ from the Public Living Room launch. Different connecting lines were used to differentiate known and potential impacts, while colour coding distinguished individual, organisational, and societal impacts. Following this, they presented the map and findings to the other participants at the sessions.

People’s Voice Media then analysed the maps and presentations, synthesising the findings to highlight commonalities (and anomalies), and make a set of key learnings, some of which we can share below:

• Public Living Rooms are having positive impacts on individuals. Staff at organisations have noticed that folk visiting Public Living Rooms regularly are seeing social, mental, and physical benefits, improving people’s lives on an individual level.
• Individual impacts can have long-term, slower moving impacts on organisations and wider society. Ripple Effect Maps indicated impacts that are happening now, or are beginning to take shape, within organisations and wider communities. These are often knock-on effects from individual impacts and show that as more and more people are positively impacted by attending Public Living Rooms, these positive effects ‘snowball’. The learning here is simple: the more Public Living Rooms there are, the more positive changes in communities there can be.
• Ripple Effect Mapping should be adopted on a regular (e.g. annual) basis to continue evaluating the impact Public Living Rooms are having. This will allow Camerados to engage in continuous learning, as well as seeing the progress of potential impacts.

If you are interested in Ripple Effect Mapping and its potential uses, email enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk and we’d be happy to have a chat.