Gaddum is an organisation based in Manchester that offers mental health and carer support services. Over autumn and winter 2025/26, People’s Voice Media held online training workshops to teach Gaddum’s peer researchers and other volunteers new skills in Community Reporting and working with lived experience stories. We recently caught up with Gaddum to find out how the Community Reporting had been going 6 months on…

When they first got in touch, Gaddum already recognised that stories were key to understanding both the impact of their work and the needs of the people they support. They were already collecting stories in different ways, but using People’s Voice Media’s Community Reporting methodology gave them a framework for collecting and analysing lived experience stories and upskilled their organisation. The people taking part in the project were a mix of paid peer researchers and volunteers from the co-production side of Gaddum. Everyone had lived experience of being a carer or mental health challenges.

The training supported two different aspects of Gaddum’s work. One, funded from the Accelerated Reform Fund, was to help Gaddum evaluate the impact of the Shared Lives and Hospital Discharge schemes. The other was to upskill people working on the co-production arm of Gaddum. This holistic approach enabled Gaddum to access the training and they now have a small pool of Community Reporters who can work on different projects as they emerge. At People’s Voice Media, we like to talk about “feeding two birds with one seed” and this project definitely achieved that!

We delivered the training online via Zoom. This helped bring the project into budget and also made it accessible to people with caring responsibilities and other disabilities who might not be able to travel to an in-person session. Through our Zoom room we managed to have some very in-depth discussions and I was particularly struck by how thoughtful and considerate the group were around the ethical issues of Community Reporting, something that we cover in our Safe and Responsible Practice element of our training.

“I thought people that were attending were getting a lot out of it, because they were asking a lot of questions, they seem really actively involved.” Project Manager for ARF, Gaddum

As homework, one Community Reporter collected a story about a person’s journey to autism diagnosis. We used this story to practice our story curation skills and had a great discussion about it, identifying key themes like the importance of support, the importance of education, the intersection between neurodivergence and mental health, and the usefulness of diagnosis as a way to understand the self and the past.

“It’s very rarely done in this way, it… nobody else does it in this way. I’m sure there are other Community Reporters in Manchester, but not in the way that we’ve done it, combined into our things around system change.” Coproduction and Engagement Service Manager, Gaddum

After completing the evidence-gathering for the ARF project, Gaddum are now looking at places to employ their Community Reporters and their skills in other areas of the organisation, such as their recent Manchester Living Well project. Although attendance and retention issues meant that fewer people completed the training than anticipated, Gaddum are still glad to have a small pool of people with these new skills, who are now going on to get more involved with other opportunities within the organisation.

“We always want to upskill and build the confidence of people, and that was just a brilliant way to do it.” Lived Experience Worker, Gaddum

If your organisation would like to use Community Reporting, a rigorous and responsible methodological framework for peer-to-peer lived experience storytelling, we can put together a bespoke training package to meet your needs and budget. Please get in touch with us at enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk to have a chat.

One of our recent successes has been our work in close conjunction with Lincolnshire Voluntary Engagement Team (LVET). LVET had a strong vision for how they wanted to use Community Reporting to enhance the role of lived experience within service development across Lincolnshire’s Health and Wellbeing sector, and it has been a really joyous experience to support them on their journey. We think the work carried out here is a great example of how place-based Community Reporting projects can be structured and rolled out to ensure sustainability and spread. Read on to find out more…

The Community Reporting Applied Learning Project is a collaboration between People’s Voice Media and Lincolnshire Voluntary Engagement Team (LVET). LVET brings together voluntary, community, faith-based, and social enterprise (VCFSE) organisations across Lincolnshire – each committed to health, care, or wellbeing. Staff and volunteers were trained to use Community Reporting as a tool for gathering lived experience stories, to identify key insights, and use these to shape local services.

I think other people’s stories are invaluable and important because when we can hear someone’s story, understand someone’s story, then actually that’s when we begin to have empathy.

This quote shows the sentiment that lies at the heart of the Lincolnshire Community Reporting Applied Learning Project. The aim is to transform how health, care, and wellbeing services connect with local people.

Since its launch in February 2025, the project has created a foundation for empathy-driven improvement by prioritising local people’s lived experiences of health and care services in the area. Lincolnshire is England’s second largest county, after Yorkshire. Its landscape stretches from the fenland by the Wash on the North Sea coast to the Humber Estuary, which creates unique geographical and demographic diversity. These differences bring distinct health challenges. In coastal regions, overlapping issues such as ageing populations, isolation, and deprivation lead to lower life expectancy and higher disease rates. As the project continues, the hope is the approach of Community Reporting will help bridge gaps in health and wellbeing, ensuring that every community’s needs are understood and addressed.

Project aim and approach

The primary aim of the project was to build the capacity of Lincolnshire’s health, care, and wellbeing workforce to use Community Reporting as a sustainable method of lived experience research. 

Gathering people’s experiences of local health and social care services, the project seeks to pick out key insights from the stories that can influence how services are designed. These learnings are then used to catalyse positive change through improvements in local services and relationships.

What we did

The project was rolled out in 3 phases. 

• Phase 1 (February 2025) – Community Reporting training: Staff and volunteers from local organisations in the health, wellbeing and voluntary sectors undertook training in story gathering and safe and responsible practice.
• Phase 2 (April 2025) Community Reporting training: After a break to allow them to gather lived experience stories, the group came back together to review and curate the stories and make sense of the findings.
  • Conversation of Change Event (June 2025): the group held an event to mobilise the stories – showcasing the stories to local changemakers and leaders and making actions for change
• Phase 3 (September 2025) Train the Trainer Training: Community Reporters then received training in how to deliver the Community Reporter training themselves. This means that the Community Reporting skills can now be spread further through the county’s VCFSE organisations and the LVET network.
  • Since this, Lincolnshire Community Reporter trainers have hosted two Community Reporter training programmes, bringing more people into the project to gather stories and feed into the insights being gathered about health and wellbeing in the county.

This model has ensured the longevity of the project, with the train-the-trainer sessions acting as capacity building exercises. The trained Community Reporters have now established a Community of Practice and means that Community Reporting can be used sustainably across the county in the voluntary sector and within the health, care, and wellbeing workforce.

Key outcomes of the project

• Lincolnshire health, care, and wellbeing workforce have developed the skills and knowledge to effectively work with lived experience storytelling within relevant service settings
• An ‘insight engine’ has been developed by using the Community Reporter Network website. The Our Shared Stories insight engine captures the lived experiences of residents on issues relevant to health, care, and wellbeing in Lincolnshire, and provides a research resource for local organisations and communities to use to enhance service provision.
• Through the stories collected, voices of residents on topics pertinent to health, care, and wellbeing have been platformed to catalyse meaningful, real-world change in Lincolnshire as part of an ongoing co-production dialogue connected to ‘Our Shared Agreement’.

Community Reporting in Lincolnshire is not just a method—it’s a movement towards fairer, more responsive services across Lincolnshire.

You can hear more about the project on this It’s All About People podcast that LVET produced after their Conversation of Change event: https://www.itsallaboutpeople.info/our-work/community-reporting

If you’d like to explore how to embed lived experience and use its insights to improve service design, development and delivery in your area, please get in touch: enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk

Future Changemakers is a three-year project, funded by BBC Children in Need, where People’s Voice Media are working with youth organisations across the country to build a Young Community Reporters Network. Each youth organisation is receiving training in the Community Reporter method, giving young people the skills and knowledge to get their voices and their lived experience stories heard to create change. We will also be working with youth leaders to undertake “train-the-trainer” work, so that they can embed youth voice within their groups for the future. Here, facilitator and project manager Lauren Wallace-Thompson gives us an update on the first youth group to take part in the programme:

I had the pleasure of working with the wonderful Army of Kindness in Rochdale, training some of the young people in Community Reporting methods to support their changemaking work. They are no strangers to social action, running weekly soup kitchens and supporting people in their community on a regular basis. A brilliant example of how people can come together in positive action!

I visited the group for evening creative workshop sessions where we looked at why stories are so important in our lives, and explored telling our own stories and what was important to us through Lego, collage, poetry and models. The young people produced sculptures dealing with bereavement, justice, and belonging; poetry about Dua Lipa and what it is to be misunderstood by your parents; and some incredible drawings by talented young artists telling memories of family trips to Umrah, and their hopes for their future. Some of the young people also shared their lived experiences of racism and prejudice, and this became a key focus for the group’s work and their social actions.

One of the things I enjoy most about my job is how I learn new things all the time from the people taking part in our projects. Every session is like a lesson from ten different teachers, all with their own specialist subjects. But the young people in Army of Kindness especially made an impact on me with their really insightful reflections on the influence of social media in their lives and the ways in which personal connections and understanding can bring people together. They also gave me an education in great snacking – grating cheese into a Pot Noodle was a culinary revelation – and I had, shockingly, never tried Irn Bru before (“Asian beer”, according to the group’s leader).

The group put the Community Reporting skills they had learnt into action when they held a community funday in the October half-term holidays, gathering video and audio stories from attendees at the funday to find out what they thought about the event. The Young Community Reporters interviewed a great range of people to get their experiences of the day, including a clown, a local councillor, and a 9-year-old entrepreneur!

The young people then learnt how to analyse the findings of our Community Reporting in a “sense-making” session. Here are the trends they identified:

• The stories provided a sense of how people had enjoyed the event, but also praise for the wider work that Army of Kindness does locally.
• People would like to see more events like this in the future.
• Attendees especially enjoyed the food and community spirit.
• People appreciated the opportunity to give towards a good cause
• The diversity of attendees was a positive and the event gave people a chance to learn about each others’ cultures.

Reflecting on the stories as a whole, the group saw how it was a way to get detailed, experiential feedback to evaluate their event, but also noted how Community Reporting could be a tool to gather information to support their group and their work going forwards, such as comments about the positive differences that Army of Kindness have made to the local community, which might support their fundraising, grant applications and profile-raising.

Here are some perspectives from the young people taking part in the Future Changemakers project:

• “I learned about dialogue interviews, different types of questions, and how to be more professional in interviews.”

• “I really enjoyed getting to know and hear about the perspectives of other people.”

• “The session was awesome, I really enjoyed it, especially the practical interviewing part.”

• “I learnt that everyone has their own stories.”

• “Everyone is human we need to stay in peace.”

• “I learned new information about life in Rochdale for religious women.”

People’s Voice Media will return to Rochdale this spring/summer to train youth leaders and older young people in a “train the Trainer” session, so that they can deliver Community Reporter training to more young people and keep the skills of Community Reporting and extend their use within Army of Kindness.

We are still in the first year of the project. Our second group are Police Cadets in the West Midlands – stay tuned for updates on how they got on. 

If you are running a youth group or other youth project and would be interested in learning a tool to increase youth voice and participation, and build communication and media skills among the young people you support, there are still some spaces left to join the project in Year 2 and 3. Please email lauren@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk for more information.

The Department for Work and Pensions is reviewing Personal Independence Payment (PIP) – a benefit that shapes the daily lives of millions of disabled people across the UK. Decisions made in this review will affect how people can pay their bills, access support, move around their communities, and live with dignity. That is why we are bringing people together for a roundtable discussion, and why the voices in the room matter so much. People’s Voice Media’s Head of Partnerships and Practice, Isaac Samuels, tells us why it’s vital that we create this space.

Lived Experience Roundtable on PIP

What is it?

On 5^th May 2026 at 6pm, People’s Voice Media are hosting a 90-minute online roundtable on PIP, as a space for people to share their stories, insights, and reflections. This will help shape a response to the current Personal Independence Payment (PIP) Review led by the Department for Work and Pensions.

This session is part of the wider national Call for Evidence, and it’s really important that the voices of people who live with the realities of PIP are centred, heard, and valued.

About the space

At People’s Voice Media, storytelling is at the heart of how we create change. This space will be grounded in that, offering a supportive environment to share real experiences of PIP, including:

• What’s working and what isn’t
• Experiences of applying, assessments, and decisions
• Where the system feels unfair or inconsistent
• How experiences differ across communities and intersecting identities
• What a more human, fair, and dignified system could look like

Why We’re Holding This Space

Reviews of this scale are too often shaped by data points, policy papers, and assumptions about what disabled people need – rather than real experiences of navigating the system. We wanted to create a space where that balance is corrected. We want people who have actually applied for PIP, been assessed for PIP, appealed decisions, waited anxiously for letters, and built their lives around this support to be able to speak honestly and be heard.

The roundtable is a focused conversation around two simple but powerful questions: What is working well? What is not working so well? From small practical improvements to bigger structural concerns, every contribution helps build a clearer, more truthful picture of how PIP is functioning today.

The insights, stories, and recommendations that come out of the discussion will be carefully captured and turned into a collective lived experience response to the government’s PIP review. We will also share key themes back with participants, partner organisations, and decision-makers who can act on them.

What PIP Enables Me to Do

I want to speak honestly for a moment, because this isn’t just a policy conversation for me – it’s my life. As a disabled person living with mental health conditions, PIP is not a luxury or an extra. It is one of the quiet, essential things that makes a decent life possible. Without it, the gap between simply surviving and actually living becomes very wide.

On a practical level, PIP helps me cover the real costs of being disabled – costs that people outside this experience often don’t see. It helps me pay for taxis on days when public transport is too overwhelming, or when leaving the house at all takes everything I’ve got. It helps me keep my home warm when my body and mind need stability. It helps me buy the food that supports my medication and my energy levels. It helps me pay for the little things – noise-cancelling headphones, a weighted blanket, the right kind of lighting – that make the difference between a manageable day and a day lost to sensory overload or a mental health dip.

But the impact goes far beyond receipts and bills. PIP gives me the breathing room to look after my mental health. It means I can attend my therapy appointments without having to choose between them and my electricity bill. It means I can say no to situations that would push me into crisis, because I am not financially forced to say yes. It means I can rest when I need to rest, instead of pushing my body and mind past the point of collapse and ending up worse off.

PIP also enables me to contribute. That part matters to me. Because I have this support, I can do the work I do: advocacy, storytelling, showing up for my community. I can hold down relationships. I can be a good friend, a present family member, a reliable colleague on the days I’m well. People often frame disability benefits as something that holds people back. For me, the truth is the opposite: PIP is what makes participation possible. It is the scaffolding that lets me show up in the world.

Living with a mental health condition alongside a disability means my needs shift. Some weeks I manage well. Other weeks, everything is harder. PIP gives me the stability to weather those shifts without falling off a cliff. It gives me dignity on my hardest days and independence on my best days. It means I don’t have to justify my existence every time my symptoms flare up.

This is the reality I want the review to understand. PIP isn’t just a payment – it is access. It is safety. It is the difference between being pushed to the edges of society and being able to take my place within it. When PIP works, it works quietly in the background, enabling people like me to build a better life. When it doesn’t, the consequences are serious – not just financially, but physically, emotionally, and psychologically.

That is why my voice, and the voices of others like me, need to be in this review.

Why Lived Experience Voices Are So Important

Lived experience is expertise. No one understands the impact of a policy better than the people who live with its consequences every day. When disabled people are at the centre of conversations about disability benefits, policy becomes sharper, fairer, and more effective. Decisions made without that expertise tend to miss the mark, creating systems that are harder to navigate, more stressful to engage with, and less responsive to real need.

Centering lived experience is also a matter of principle. “Nothing about us without us” should be the minimum standard. If the government is serious about improving PIP, then the people who rely on it must be genuinely heard, not just consulted as an afterthought.

What to Expect

The space will be rooted in lived experience storytelling, and offer different ways to contribute. Your insights will directly inform a collective lived experience response to the review.

Date: Tuesday 5 May

Time: 6:00pm – 7:30pm

Location: Online (joining link will be sent once you confirm your place)

How to join: Please email isaac@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk with any questions, or to confirm you’d like to attend, and we’ll send over the joining link and any final details.

If you have any access needs or would prefer to contribute in a different way, please just let us know. We’ll make sure the space works for you.

We are grateful to everyone who is showing up to share their story. Your voice will shape what we take to government – and that is exactly how it should be.

The team at People’s Voice Media are very excited about the prospect of working with Agora Koln in Cologne again. This project about civic participation is funded by the Cultural Bridge Fund which enables nonprofit organisations from the UK and Germany to connect by sharing knowledge and practice. 

Drawing on case studies from a revitalised neighbourhood public space in Cologne, Germany and a publicly owned community centre in Dalry, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, this project investigates the motivations and challenges experienced by individuals engaged in civic initiatives. By comparing these distinct contexts – urban and rural – the project seeks to identify shared values and generate insights into participation, belonging, and the impact of collective action.

The research will explore the factors motivating civic engagement, strategies for sustaining involvement, and the barriers participants face, with particular attention to interactions with local authorities.

It will give us a fabulous opportunity to continue our research into volunteering and dig deep into why civic participation matters to people.

We’ll use People’s Voice Media’s Community Reporting methods to train participants in how to collect stories from peers in an ethical and non-extractive way and share them digitally. They’ll interview individuals, record audio, take photos, and collaborate with those involved. Through online meetings, participants will share their findings and there will be a chance to meet in person when three delegates from each community will visit one another, tour the sites, and share their thoughts about their own experience of civic participation. During the year, this hybrid and international project will link both communities, amplify their voices, and demonstrate the impact of civic engagement on places and people.

The fund empowers ‘hands across the sea’ partnerships where together nonprofit organisations can co-produce, co-design, share skills, knowledge and practice. We are so excited to get started – watch this space for updates!