The Our Voices project aims to curate and mobilize stories of different people and communities in order to create important dialogues with local and European policy makers. Co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, the project has developed a digital curator training programme that was launched in Berlin earlier this month.

The programme aims to support participants to develop knowledge and techniques on digital story curation and explore how these skills, expertise and understandings can be used in communities to support people to have their voices heard by decision makers. As part of the programme, participants will explore topics such as what is story curation, how to source and analyze stories, how to package and use them to create influence and what ethical issues need to be considered when curating stories.

The participants who took part in this programme will now redeliver key elements of what they have learned. Working with people and communities in the settings in which they work, the participants will share their new skills with them and support them to connect their stories with decision-makers. These pan-European pilot activities will test out a new way of working with the knowledge of experience and bridge the divide between citizens and decision makers. More on how this all works out, soon!

This Digital Curator Toolkit, produced as part of the Our Voices project, aims to support people to use the knowledge in stories of lived experience to create positive change and impact within their communities. It covers the same topics as the Our Voices Digital Curator Training Programme. Ideally, it should be used in tandem with this training to support you to utilise the knowledge and skills from the training to deliver story curation activities in community and informal learning settings. However, it can also be used independently by professionals working in a range of fields including community development, digital storytelling, and education

Within the context of the Internet and the digital age, the term ‘content curation’ is broadly used to describe the process for gathering, organising and presenting information in relation to a specific subject. Based on this understanding, the Our Voices approach to Story Curation is concerned with:

1. Sourcing stories via various digital storytelling methods and story banks
2. Curating stories by analysing their content and packaging this analysis into digital outputs
3. Mobilising stories and curated digital outputs by connecting them decision-makers who are in a position to create positive change for communities

This toolkit is structured in the same way as the process outlined above and in each section of the toolkit there is information on the subject matter to enable you to develop your digital story curation skills. At the end of each section, there is a guide for facilitators and adapted resources and activities that will support you to deliver digital story curation training activities in informal learning environments and/or community settings. Specifically, this guide focuses on making story curation accessible for learners with low levels of literacy and academic ability (including those with learning disabilities).

The book concludes with some additional resources you might find useful when delivering curation activities and to support your continued professional development in this field.  Download it below.

People’s Voice Media’s has joined forces with Stockport Council to unearth the relationship between poverty and work. Working with the neighbourhood development team, we have equipped them with the skills to be Community Reporter Trainers and Curators, and supported them to recruit and skill-up local people as Community Reporters.

As part of the project, the Reporters gathered stories about people’s experiences of work and poverty and worked with the team to curate the stories into a set of findings published in a report. These findings were then used by People’s Voice Media in a Conversation of Change workshop to generate ideas for tackling some of the issues. The ideas generated in this session are being developed into a pilot project that we are supporting via our co-creation practices. You can hear more about this project by watching the case study video below.

For a number of years, Johan Flyckt has been using people’s stories to impact on the way in which social housing services are provided in Sweden. Using Community Reporting methodologies, Johan has been using the lived experiences of people to impact on decision makers around important issues. And it is this impact that the Our Voices project seeks to build on.

Opening the fourth transnational partnership meeting for the Our Voices project, Johan reflected on the barriers he had encountered in getting people’s voices to be heard – an issue that is pertinent to this project. He discussed how he had used real voices and stories in reports and films to help influence the way that things are done in his work place. This gave the Our Voices partnership much food for thought and discussion… setting the collaborative learning tone of the meeting.

Over the last six months, the Our Voices team, led by People Voice Media, has designed a 5-day training-the-trainer course on story curation. This meeting provided partners with a good opportunity to discuss the first draft of this curriculum and offer feedback, suggestions and adaptations based on their expertise and cultural understandings. Based on this feedback, the training programme is currently being finalized ready for its launch in September, where in the hosting city of Berlin it will be piloted with a pan-European group of trainers. More news about the training course and the project – coming soon!

As part of the CoSIE project, Valènciactiva is working with the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) to co-design and pilot a new business creation and development scheme with a variety of stakeholders. To kick-start this process, People’s Voice Media trained staff members from Valènciactiva and UPV in Community Reporting for Insight Methods which were used as part of their first co-creation workshop.

Within the workshop a range of stakeholders – from NGOs to members of regional government, business mentors to unemployed people – used storytelling to share their experiences of supporting people back into employment or how they have been supported to get back into employment themselves. With these stories, the stakeholders used the experiences of people in the room to generate ideas for the business creation and development programme. Core ideas that emerged were the need for empathy from service providers and to better connect existing provision to meet the needs of users.

Following this workshop, the Valènciactiva and UPV staff worked with People’s Voice Media to curate the stories and ideas from the co-creation workshop into a synthesis of findings and emergent suggestions for the co-design phase of the pilot. Watch the behind-the-scenes video below to find out more!