Stories can be the means by which people work out their thoughts and ideas: they can be an exploration, a search for meaning or an offering up to others. People’s stories about their experiences provide useful insights into what is happening in their lives and communities. Stories like these are a valuable source of qualitative data that can be used to inform the findings of research projects, provide intricate understandings of issues pertinent to communities, be catalysts of change in service design, advise local and national agendas and policies, and much more.

Through exploring curation methodologies, the Our Voices project seeks to enhance the ways in which people and communities can use their stories to create positive change. This book is a presentation of the project’s initial findings into how people, groups, communities and organisations across Europe are currently collecting, curating and creating impact with stories and how this can be used to develop a pan-European curriculum on story curation. Download the full publication by clicking on the link below.

As part of the Greater Manchester Public Service Reform (GMPSR), the strategy for supporting the most at-need communities has been the adopted of place-based interventions (PBI). This way of working has seen the development of neighbourhood hubs and teams, aimed at supporting residents with multiple needs.

People’s Voice Media’s and our Greater Manchester network have been working with specific PBI teams to gather insight into the lives of residents in the area. These stories have formed the basis of a curated report, which you download below.

Supporting Transitions is a project that uses video storytelling methods and Community Reporting practices to support families with disabled children to enhance personalisation in transition processes. The key idea was to put family voice at the heart of transition, whether than be through using video clips to enhance Education Healthcare plans or using family stories to give insight to different social professionals about what life is like in that family. The project was run in partnership with AQuA and Bridgewater NHS.

The initial pilot of the project involved co-producing with parents of disabled children a training programme that enabled them to learn about how to:

• communicate their family’s story and their child’s needs and uniqueness on video
• understand and use responsible storytelling practices
• use basic video recording practices on smartphones and tablets
• share videos safely and securely online with a range of education, social and healthcare professional

To do this we used core elements of our Community Reporting for Storytelling and Insight programmes and adapted them for a new context and usage.

Following the programme and using the learning from it, the families involved co-designed online learning tools (interactive presentations, video tutorials and handouts) that would support other families to get involved in the project. The results, impact and learning from this proejct was presented at the ISQua 2017 International Conference as part of a panel of projects supported by the Health Foundation.

You can find out more about the impact that this work has had on one family who participated by watching the short case study video below!

As part of the InnoSI project, People’s Voice Media and the Institute of Community Reporters (ICR) have been running a series of 2-Day Community Reporting for Insight programmes across Europe to capture user voice on the topics and themes from the social investment case studies being examined in the project. On these programmes, participants have captured their own and their peers’ accounts of their lived experiences using the video and audio recording functions on portable technology such as smartphones and tablets.

The stories gathered were on topics such as family life, employment, education, and integration into society. These user-created stories not only provide a diverse range of ‘bottom-up’ insights about people’s lived experience of social investment and innovation programmes, but they also give information about the wider contexts of their lives, the challenges that they face and their hopes and aspirations.

These stories were then curated and the key findings from this process were presented back as a geo-map, short summative reports and video edits. Find out more about the role of Community Reporting by watching the video below.

People’s Voice Media have been commissioned by Advancing Quality Alliance (AQuA) to run 7 Community Reporting for Co-Production projects across the North West. As part of these projects, young people were trained as Community Reporters and tasked them with gather their own, other young people’s, their parents and professionals’ experiences of transition in different healthcare services. With the stories gathered, the young Reporters worked with one of our Trainers to edit them in short films that created a dialogue on transition amongst the different perspectives captured.

The short films gather people’s experiences of the transition services in areas such as mental health, epilepsy and diabetes. The stories and films helped professionals to understand better the needs of young people and their families in transition and use this knowledge to enhance their transition process further. You can take a look at one of the films made on young people’s experience of moving on into adult mental health services by clicking the link below.