We’ve all heard of ‘co-creation’, but what is its value or is it just another buzz word? As part of the CoSIE project – a 3-year programme of work that looks at the co-creation of public services across Europe – our team headed out to Wroclaw, Poland in May this year to use Community Reporting as a way of exploring what co-creation meant to residents and people working in different areas such as community development and public services there.

As part of this, we ran a short storytelling session in which participants recorded their reflections on the opportunities and challenges offered by co-creation. They then reviewed their stories and came up with some key findings and insights from them. The group identified that co-creation is not always easy and didn’t prescribe to the ‘rose-tinted-glasses’ version of co-creation you sometimes hear where everyone always gets along. Instead the group made points such as the difficulties involved in understanding other people’s perspectives when they are different than your own and how services do find it challenging engaging with the people who access them.

However, despite such accounts, the group did whole-heartedly value the opportunities offered by co-creation as when done in meaningful ways it enables residents to have influences on services and that hearing other people’s experiences can be enriching. Furthermore, the stories identified an appetite for co-creation from residents – they wanted to be a part of change processes. You can view a subtitled version of their edited stories here.

Whilst we were in Wroclaw we also worked with local Community Leaders who ran community centres in different areas and trained them as Community Reporters. We also worked with them to explore how people’s stories of lived experiences could help them in co-creation processes. We’re hoping that by embedding Community Reporting skills in local communities the opportunities offered by co-creation, in particularly listening and working with the knowledge of lived experience can stretch beyond the life-span of the project and influence the ‘way that things are done’ long into the future!

One of PVM’s current project involvements in Eurospectives 2.0. The project aims to create a European curriculum for digital storytelling, empowering learners and teachers.

Earlier in June, we attended the third project TNP meeting, hosted by project partners, the CFR centre. Over two days, we made exciting progress on the project and even found time to enjoy a well-earned dinner. You can read all about it here on the Eurospectives blog.

We are delighted to be collaborating with Liverpool MakeFest and Ignite Liverpool to provoke a conversation on the power of storytelling and how lived experiences can be used to create social change.

We will be sharing our personal experience of using storytelling to make social impact and change focusing on key learning from the Our Voices project (a pan European digital story curation and mobilisation project) and linking this learning to real work contexts. We are beginning to see the importance of personal stories in decision making processes and how they can be instrumental to creating new ideas, ways of doing things and ultimately bringing about social change. In this talk, we will explore what the practical implementation of terms such as ‘co-design’, ‘co-production’ and ‘co-creation’ mean and how they can bring about – or not – the inclusion and utilisation of a wider diversity of people’s voices into decision making realms. Through this we will set out her vision for how traditional power and decision structures can be dismantled, and more equitable platforms and arenas built in their place. Hopefully we will spark a discussion about storytelling and social change, and tap into other people’s knowledge, experience and passion for being digital disruptors! 

If you would like to join in the discussion make sure you book your Liverpool MakeFest2019 free ticket.

Earlier this month we delivered the ‘Co-creating (Public) services with stories of lived experiences’ symposium as part of the first annual Institute of Community Reporters’ conference… and what a blast it was!

Contributions on the day came from lived experience experts, policy advisors, volunteers, researchers and academics, public service workers and management, NGO workers from the housing, voluntary, asylum and refugee support sectors, co-creation facilitators and health and social care professionals. The programme began by celebrating our work and the storytelling movement we began in 2007. This session explored how the Community Reporting method could support people to use lived experiences to create effective social change. Members of TLAP and NCAG then presented their ‘Making It Real‘ framework, and summarised how gathering stories of lived experiences fed into this work. They highlighted how authenticity was key and how it was important that not just positive stories and experiences were given a platform. 

Discussions about storytelling for impact then progressed onto a session led by the Our Voices partnership, who shared with the attendees some of the project’s best practice models around story curation. The Digital Curator Toolkit is a great resource to start with! The attendees did some basic story curation tasks and got to grips with how to analyse people’s stories.

Plenty of discussions were then had around how to mobilise local voices to create policy ideas. As part of this session, the VOICITY’s project presented some of the learning they had garnered on their research into diverse communities in Berlin, Budapest, Salford and Sassari. You can take a look at the Community Reporter research report here. As part of this session, attendees discusses topics such as equity, integration, inclusion and voice.

The CoSIE partners concluded the symposium’s sessions with a collaborative key note and audience dialogue. Individuals from the project presented a number of ideas and concepts to do with the co-creation of public services, initiating discussions around the challenges of co-creation, reflections of co-creation in practice, change barriers and the politics of deep listening, young people’s voice & child protection in Finland and much more.

If this has sparked your interest in working with the knowledge of lived experience to support and enhance service development, you might be interested in attending our CPD workshop: From Consultation to Co-Creation Working Effectively with Lived Experiences. This 1-Day Continued Professional Development workshop will help you develop your knowledge, skills and expertise in how to address the challenges of working with the knowledge of lived experience, tying it in to co-creative processes and bottom-up change structures. Book now as places are limited!

Working with partners in Hungary as part of the CoSIE project – a 3-year programme of work that looks at the co-creation of public services across Europe – the People’s Voice Media team have been using Community Reporting techniques to support people living in rural areas of the country to share their stories.

In the CoSIE project, 9 pilots are taking place to test out different co-creation methods in different public services and the Hungarian pilot aims to revive forgotten culture of household economy, horticulture and livestock farming on disadvantaged rural areas. The pilot seeks to strengthen the local families (and community) to develop their role in the local economy and enhance the local families’ awareness, self-respect and self-subsistence. As part of the pilot, families will be supported to design and implement their own household economy plans with equipment, mentoring and coordination. The pilot will also prepare the local actors (mayors, coordinators) for mobilizing the household economies.

Earlier this year, two of our trainers from Budapest went to Solznok to work with families and coordinators involved in the pilot to train them as Community Reporters and capture their stories of the pilot so far. Whilst people were initially a little sceptical about this method and thought they were going to be attending a “boring lecture”, their feedback at the end couldn’t have been more different! They connected to the ethos of Community Reporting and valued the time and space it gave them to share their ideas and experiences with one another. The group have set-up a closed Facebook group to share their stories for peer review with one another, and they’ve posted some initial stories on the Community Reporter website – you can have a look at some of them here!

The best news is that the group have asked for more! So the team will be back in Solznok in September doing some skills recapping and also teaching some new technical capacities such as video editing. We’ll give you an update on how the work progresses later in the year.