Wednesday 9th October 2019
10:00am – 4:30pm
Ziferblat, 23 Edge St, Manchester M4 1HW
£175.00 per person (lunch and refreshments included) / Limited places

Looking for alternative methods to tackle ‘wicked’ or multifaceted problems?

Looking for tools to support decision-making in complex environments?

Looking to start or enhance you work with experiential knowledge and data?

Then this workshop is for you… book now!

People’s lived experiences are becoming increasingly important in decision-making processes. They are instrumental to creating new ideas, ways of doing things and ultimately bringing about social change. Within this context, concepts such as ‘co-design’, ‘co-production’ and ‘co-creation’ are becoming more mainstream within a range of public and third sector support services, and are firmly on the agenda of local and national Governments and commissioners. It is therefore important that those working in these fields understand the value of lived experience as a knowledge base and how it can be practically used to inform practice, influence policy and initiate change in meaningful ways.

This 1-Day Continued Professional Development workshop will help you develop your knowledge, skills and expertise in how to addresses the challenges of working with the knowledge of lived experience, tying it in to co-creative processes and bottom-up change structures. Through a mixture of practical tasks, case studies and presentations, discussions and one-to-one facilitator time, you will get to grips with such concepts and approaches can be better utilised in your role and organisation. As part of this workshop you will:

• Explore different types of lived experience and identify how they can be gathered and used at to create impact at individual, organisational and systemic levels
• Assess the challenges and opportunities to working with the knowledge of lived experience and examine how barriers to implementation can be overcome 
  
• Create a bespoke plan for working with the knowledge of lived experience in your role and organisation, and develop your ideas using peer support and critical-thinking approaches 

This workshop is perfect for team, middle and strategic management professionalsworking in sectors such as health and social care, education, community development and infrastructure support and public services who want to understand how to better use lived experience as a tool for quality, service or organisation development. 

The workshop has a limited number of places to ensure quality of experience. Book now! 

About People’s Voice Media

People’s Voice Media is a charity and social enterprise established in 1995 with an extensive history in creating social change from the ground-up. With our digital storytelling methodology – Community Reporting – we support people, groups and organisations to use experiential knowledge and insights from people’s stories to inform change at individual, organisational and systemic levels. Working on a range of local, national and pan-European projects, we have led and innovatated in using lived experience in research projects, service co-creation, community development initiatives and much more.

Dr. Hayley Trowbridge has played a core role in developing and applying our methodology and practice in these arenas over the last few years and will be the lead facilitator on this workshop. With over a decade of experience in creative, education, community development and research sectors, Hayley has a diverse skillset and experience of working with different stakeholders and institutional contexts to apply participatory practices and use experiential knowledge to inform change processes. She currently leads our work on the CoSIE project–  a pan-European applied research study that looks at co-creation practices across Europe, as well as embedding Community Reporting as part of evaluation processes, the co-designing of strategies and service improvement projects at a local and national level with the UK. 

People’s Voice Media is a value driven charity and social enterprise committed to bringing about social change from the ground-up. We do this through using Community Reporting to support people to use digital tools to tell their own stories, in their own ways. We connect the insights in these stories with decision and change makers to help people change their own world, and the world around them. Our work is across the UK and Europe.

As we grow our storytelling movement, we are looking to recruit a temporary Project Worker (Training & Delivery) for 3 months (Jul/Aug start) for 2-days per week (£25,500 pro rota). We’re looking for an aspiring leader with strong facilitation and interpersonal skills to plan, design and deliver workshops for a range of participants. You’ll have the ability to work across different projects, be able to manage your time effectively and keep a keen eye on the details. You’ll collaborate with the team and partners effectively, whilst also being able to work autonomously and take on responsibility.

We need someone who understands and lives out our core values and vision to use lived experience as a tool for social change. You’ll largely work remotely, with travel across the UK and Europe and occasional office days in Salford. There is the opportunity for this role to expand and grow with the organisation, so we want someone with the right personal qualities, vision and expertise to join us on our journey.

SOUNDS LIKE YOU?

To apply, send us a little bit of information about you and what you’d bring to the role via text, audio or video by 13^thJune to Hayley on hayley@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk. We’ll then invite some people to meet us and take part in some team-working activities on 21st June in Liverpool. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Last week we were back with the CoSIE Horizon2020 project in Valencia, Spain working with entrepreneurs to support them to tell their stories using Community Reporting methodologies.

Over two days, a group of 7 entrepreneurs joined us to explore how video storytelling techniques could help them communicate to others how they became entrepreneurs, what motivates them, what challenges they’ve encountered on the way and how they’ve overcome these, and what successes they have had. As part of the training, the entrepreneurs got to grips with video recording techniques, using them to capture short snapshot stories about their experiences as part of the Spanish pilot – the Co-Crea-Te co-working and mentoring space. They then used storyboards and mind maps to pull together their ideas about their entrepreneur journeys, before bring these ideas to life on video and with photographs. They then used basic editing skills to combine them together in to short films.

Their stories shed light on important issues about co-creation and entrepreneurship such as how people came to their ‘a-ha moments’, the value of mentoring and coaching, how to make the best use of your talents and interests, how to build effective networks and much more. There stories will be appearing on the Community Reporter website soon… so watch this space!

It’s not long now until the 1st Annual Institute of Community Reporter’s conference – From the Margins To The Mainstream: Putting people’s voice at the heart of decision-making processes – is happening, and now to accompany our main symposium, we’ve got some exciting fringe events running throughout June to tell you about!

Narratives, the stories that people choose to tell about their own experience, are of increasing importance in decision-making processes and are instrumental to creating new ideas, ways of doing things and ultimately bringing about social change. With terms such as ‘co-design’, ‘co-production’ and ‘co-creation’ becoming the popular discourse in a range of industries such as academic, public and third sector support services, and local and national Governments, it is imperative to explore what the practical implementation of these terms means and how they bring about – or not – the inclusion and utilisation of a wider diversity of people’s voices into decision-making realms. The conference’s fringe events are taking place in different locations in the North West and Yorkshire, and are picking up on key aspects of these subject matters, as well as providing practical training and workshops on them. So, what have we got coming up?

Our first fringe event take’s place in Huddersfield. Working with the University of Huddersfield and Creative Minds as part of the #softandfluffy project, People’s Voice Media will be using the Our Voices story curation methodology to begin to analyse the stories about creativity and wellbeing that the project has been gathering. This staff training day, on the 4th June, will equip people working in creative, wellbeing and community settings with the skills to make sense of the insights in stories of lived experience co-produce findings from them.

We will then be in Stockport later in the month working with a team of people from children’s services, again using the Our Voices method, to help us to use insights from stories of young people’s relationship with support services to help direct a local strategy.

And finally, our fringe event tour will end at Liverpool MakeFest on the 29th June, where team member Hayley will be giving an Ignite talk on changing the world, one story at a time as part of their ‘what life might be like in 2049’ theme. Exploring the learning from the Digital Curator Toolkit, produced as part of the Our Voices project, Hayley will be linking its application to real world contexts and sparking a discussion about storytelling and social change.

Watch this space to see how our conference programme rolls out!

It’s only a few weeks until the sell-out, Co-Creating (Public) Services with Stories of Lived Experience symposium. We’re now really excited to launch our full programme, you can see the full programme here.

At the event, academics, people who access services, co-creation facilitators, service providers, local municipalities and public services, and third sector organisations will come together to explore how people’s own experiential knowledge can be used to inform service design and implementation, policies and much more. The speakers are from across the UK and Europe and offer different perspectives and experiences of co-creation. Their sessions will examine how the power of people’s stories can be used as part of co-creation activities and their own learning about this. The event promises to be dialogue provoking, active and a great opportunity to meet people involved in co-creation and exchange ideas.

If you’ve not got a ticket, you can still join the waiting list.