Funded by a National Lottery award from the National Lottery Community Fund.
 

This Black History Month, we are thrilled to announce that we have been awarded funding from the National Lottery Community Fund’ to run a 18 month Global Majority Community Reporter project. The project is set to start in November 2024 and builds on our existing work in this area. 

This funding will allow us to continue strengthening our Community Reporting network, with a dedicated focus on training and supporting Global Majority Community Reporters. Through our work in Community Reporting, we strive to broaden the narrative, making sure that storytelling is a powerful movement for change and becomes increasingly inclusive of underrepresented voices.

Changing the World, One Story at a Time

At People’s Voice Media, we believe that stories are a powerful tool for creating change and we are committed to amplifying the voices of those from Global Majority backgrounds in our work. They are not only reflections of our experiences but also agents of transformation. However, we recognise that this journey will look and feel different for Global Majority individuals, and therefore this project will recruit, train and mentor people from Global Majority communities to use lived experience storytelling to support racial justice.

The aims of the project are to build the capacity of people from Global Majority communities to be leaders in co-production and social change fields. Through a mixture of training, peer support and mini-social action projects we want to create a space where the experiences of global majority individuals are not only amplified but also central to the change we aim to achieve. Also establishing an England-wide Global Majority peer support network for people from Global Majority communities working in co-production and social change arenas. We know this work is essential to addressing the deep societal inequalities that persist, and storytelling can be the key to unlocking new possibilities for justice and equity.

A New Chapter for Inclusive Storytelling

Through this initiative, we want to further embed anti-racist practice across our Community Reporter network and create spaces for people with experiences of racism to talk about this safely. We hope that this will contribute to transformational change in our own work and the boarder co-production sphere, creating racial justice in these settings. 

The work will be led by Isaac Samuels – the Community Reporting lead at People’s Voice Media. It builds on their current work with the Co-Production Collective that has been researching the lived experiences of racialised communities in co-production and research and working with organisations in this arena to turn the insights from people’s stories into applied action. 

In the coming weeks, we will be sharing more about this exciting project, including how people can get involved. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue this vital work!

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.

Dragons Voice CIC started working with People’s Voice Media (PVM) on the HOME? Project in May 2022 after discussions with Hayley (CEO of PVM). We feel privileged to be part of this project as we have worked with another organisation on a similar type of project. Initially we intended to gather stories from the BNO new arrivals from Hong Kong but this was not welcomed by that community as many feared for their safety and did not want to participate in a project that will showcase how they are living now since arriving in the UK.

We discussed this with PVM and Kath kindly agreed that we could look at alternative sectors of the Chinese community. In the end we recruited mainly from Mandarin speaker from mainland China who arrived in the UK within the last 10 years.

We found members of the PVM team to be very understanding and willing to adapt to our changing circumstances. As the director authorising the partnership agreement, I felt that PVM as an organisation stands true to its values. I have met Hayley a few times when I attended some training (early 2021) and at a conference way back in 2017. What came across was the philosophy of non-exploitation and letting people take control of their own stories.

How have the participants benefited from the project?

The participants who attended the Community Reporter training gained skills in doing short snapshot and dialogue interviews. They used a tablet to record the videos at the training sessions. The interviews were spoken in Chinese languages so they did not have to struggle with speaking in a second language. Some gathered stories after the training and uploaded them onto the Community Reporter website.

Those who attended the archive research training completed summaries of stories they found in the Manchester Evening newspaper. The focus was on finding stories on positive contributions from migrants. The skills they developed were firstly to locate the articles online and then sifting through the articles to find relevant stories. To conclude, they had to summarise and transfer core information onto the spreadsheet.

The training provided opportunities for strangers to meet up with other peers and transfer some of the learning into practice. Those who struggled with the archive research due to language were supported by those who had better English abilities. The project provided opportunities for participants to talk about and reflect on their migration journeys. Dragons Voice created 2 part-time posts for its volunteers, one to co-ordinate and the other to support in recruitment and organising activities.

Has Dragon’s Voice learned anything from taking part or from the stories?

There are many similarities in the stories, namely people migrate for better opportunities in life. There are always challenges to overcome in the initial transition, be it the weather in UK, availability of food they normally eat, language barriers or employment opportunities. The approach to interviewing in Community Reporting is very different to interviewing to mine for information, which is how we normally work when interviewing guests on our radio shows. In future we should be less focused on getting information we want and instead adopt a facilitative approach for the individuals we interview to tell their stories.

As a director I have learned to devise employment contracts for freelance workers but is not quite sure what to do when they pull out mid-way. I have had to step in and luckily as I had overall management of the project, I was able to pick it up without much trouble.

The Knowledge Exchange event puts the stories we gathered into a wider context and the roadmaps produced offers a sense of direction for future actions. It was good to meet up with other partners at the partners meetings, who worked across broader areas and are much more politically aware. Their comments provided different perspectives and food for thought.

At the conference in Liverpool, I found out about the other great projects that PVM is involved in and it opened my eyes to the broader work of community reporting.

I am painfully aware that Manchester has diverse migrant communities and it was with regret that we did not include these other groups in our project. We did offer the archive training to ALLFM presenter but there was no uptake advertising it on the volunteers steering group meetings and at ALLFM studio. We need to consider in future how to engage with other migrant groups within Manchester.

It is with much appreciation that Dragons Voice CIC was able to be a partner on this project. We hope to be able to work with People’s Voice Media again in the future.

Denise Yuen Megson

Director

Dragons Voice CIC

People’s Voice Media recently worked with Dr. Dayo Eseonu from Lancaster University on a research project investigating racial justice and equality that saw us work with racially minoritised young people in South Manchester as part of a 3-day Community Reporting programme. Tony, our facilitator, shares his experiences of the programme…

The participants are young people (13 to 15 years old) who were attending Rekindle’s summer school in Hulme, Manchester. I was tasked with equipping the young people with Community Reporting skills to share their lived experiences about their experience of place from a racial justice and equality lens.

There was so much that resonated with me about this piece of work as it brought up my early years of experience of education and racial injustice. As a part of my preparation, I visited the school’s website and was immediately impressed with the school’s ethos and especially their strapline “The school you wish you’d attended”.

There were some challenges on the project, such as the age range of the group being slightly younger than I had expected and each day having slightly different participants (rather than the same group throughout). However, I adapted the session plan to keep the young people engaged with a variety of participative activities and I was mindful of a conversation that we had previously had at People’s Voice Media, wherein we spoke about giving ourselves the permission to be creative. Technical issues with the recording kit meant that the stories we gathered couldn’t be used as recordings due to sound quality but we were still able to get rich insights from the young people about their experiences of growing-up in the city. They developed skills in interviewing and storytelling, even if the technology failed us! 

Working on this project it was important that I created Timothy Clarke’s four stages of psychological safety in order to make it a space in which the young people could share lived experiences connected to racial equality and justice:

1. Inclusion Safety: People feel comfortable and wanted in a group.
2. Learner Safety: People feel able to ask questions, try things out and make mistakes. (The group did this in bucket loads!)
3. Contributor Safety: People feel safe enough to share their own ideas without being embarrassed.
4. Challenger Safety: People challenge other group members’ opinions including the group leader’s opinion. Fostering the culture of safety to challenge meant that young people were able to have ‘brave space conversations’ which are more meaningful than safe space conversations.

It is these pillars that enabled us to have so many insightful, challenging, productive and human conversations throughout the three days. 

Overall, the sessions were fun, there was a point when one of the young people asked me about my motivation for working with young people and I paused, looked up and another young person was trying to fit an elastic band around his head… I explained that it is moments like these that I relish working with young people.

The HOME? heritage project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund has been focusing on the collection, curation, and dissemination of lived experiences of migrants (including refugees, people seeking asylum and other migrants) living in Northern England over the last 10 years. 

In August we pulled together the feedback gathered from the 5 Knowledge Exchanges in the 5 areas during Refugee Week in June and the Pan Northern Knowledge exchange in July in Liverpool. We are now collating the feedback to create roadmaps/action plans for each area including an overarching one for the North of England.

A total of 117 people attended the Knowledge Exchanges and people in each of the areas had the opportunity to hear people’s oral histories about their lived experiences of coming to live in the UK. 

The Knowledge Exchanges gave the wider community the opportunity to learn about this heritage, provoke discussion around the issues and people came up with ideas to input into a local road map/action plan that will help to – 

• disseminate the learning.
• create actions that help people to develop compassion and understanding. 

People said the event had inspired them to “get more involved”, “pay more attention”, “speak out more” and given them greater awareness. One expressed an intention to start volunteering. People demonstrated a shift in attitudes. One response described how they would “talk to people more positively about new migrants”, while another stated they would “be more aware of the importance to make people more aware of the similarities we share with asylum seekers, why they come and should not be a competition for resources, housing or jobs”. Another answer described how the event had left them feeling “more excited to be positive and keep working hard to adapt to life as a newcomer in the UK”. These responses show a positive personal impact on some of the attendees of the events.

The main key ideas that came up from the Knowledge Exchanges are:

• Campaigning for better rights for Migrants, Refugees, and asylum seekers – this includes the right to work, better housing, better financial help, better health support and more legal support.
• Connecting support services together more effectively.
• The need for specific trauma informed mental health support.
• Creating more activities for people to combat social isolation, especially for young men.
• Better targeted health care support for women.
• More ESOL support.

The feedback from the Knowledge Exchanges and the roadmaps will inform project resources that are being produced now, in phase 4 of the project, which is focusing on Widening Impact by producing –

• an educational toolkit – this will be a resource pack for organisations and individuals to use.
• a website – the stories, newspaper database and toolkit will be available from the website.
• a local newspaper story archive/database
• an animation – which will also be part of the toolkit and screened across the 5 areas in early 2024.

During each Knowledge Exchange there was also the opportunity for people to sign up to get involved with the project and many people have signed up. In response to this we are currently planning more Community Reporting training, Archive Research Training and Train the Trainers training that will happen from Oct through to March.