Thera Scotland and People’s Voice Media are using lived-experience stories to open conversations about accountability, advocacy and better support in adult social care. In this blog, project manager and Head of Team and Operations, Kath Peters, tells us more.

What does accountability in adult social care look like when it is shaped by the people who experience services first-hand?

Since January, People’s Voice Media has been working with Thera Scotland to explore this question through lived-experience storytelling; gathering people’s views on what transparent accountability means in practice.

Thera Scotland supports people with a learning disability across Scotland, helping them have more control over their support and live their lives as they choose. Funded by IMPACT, the UK centre for implementing evidence in adult social care, our project forms part of a wider effort to bring research, lived experience and practice-based knowledge together to improve frontline services.

A key aim for the work is to create space for Disabled people, caregivers and supporters to share their stories, reflect on why accountability matters, and identify how adult social care could work better for the people who rely on it.

Training Community Reporters

The project began in February with online training sessions. Participants were introduced to Community Reporting techniques and supported to start meaningful conversations with others about their experiences of adult social care. The training helped people feel more confident to listen carefully, ask open questions and capture stories in a respectful way.

Members, volunteers and caregivers then spoke with friends and family about how the lack of accountability and inefficient complaints procedures affects people’s lives and what better systems could look like. These insights were brought together in a short video, which became the starting point for a Conversation of Change event on 29 June 2026.

From awareness to improvement

A Conversation of Change event is a tool that we use to progress a project from the stage of collecting stories, to using those stories to create change. At a Conversation of Change event, excerpts from stories sharing people’s lived and living experience are used as a catalyst for discussion, reflection and practical improvement. Lived experience is placed at the centre of the conversation, rather than seen as an add-on to professional knowledge. Service providers, supporters and members of the wider community are invited to actively participate in the event, learning from the stories and thinking about concrete actions towards change.

Through the video stories, Disabled people and carers were able to express what transparent accountability means in everyday life. Topics explored included:

• how decisions are explained
• how concerns are responded to
• how people can challenge poor practice without feeling ignored or powerless

Overall, the stories demonstrated that when support works well, people are more able to make choices, build confidence and live with greater independence. When it falls short, the impact can be felt not only by the person receiving support, but also by families, caregivers and wider support networks. This showed how practical issues intersect with people’s personal and interior lives.

Conversation of Change events act as a bridge between awareness and action. By hearing directly from people with lived experience, those involved in shaping and delivering services are encouraged to think beyond broad commitments and consider what accountability looks like in day-to-day practice. That might mean clearer communication, more consistent follow-up when concerns are raised, stronger advocacy routes, or better ways of involving people in decisions about their own support.

Actions for change

IMPACT will now use the video as a conversation starter at targeted events, to help partners move from reflection to practical action. These events will invite people to look closely at what has been shared, identify the actions that matter most, and consider how to make tangible change. Raising awareness of the issues is the first step, but the events create a clear route from lived-experience insight to demonstrable change in adult social care.

By continuing to share and discuss these stories, the project keeps attention focused on the people most affected by adult social care. Community Reporting and lived experience storytelling are used to open dialogue, challenge assumptions and support more accountable, person-centred ways of working. As the work develops, the conversations begun through Thera Scotland, People’s Voice Media and IMPACT’s partnership will help shape practical actions that are informed by the realities of people’s lives.

At People’s Voice Media, our core value is that people should be able to tell their own stories, on their own terms, and those stories should be used to create understanding and influence change.

As part of Touretteshero’s Knowledge Builders programme, Isaac Samuels, Head of Partnerships and Campaigns at People’s Voice Media, is using this approach to explore an important and sometimes difficult question: what does anti-racism mean to disabled people, and how can disabled communities build stronger solidarity in challenging racism?

The project brings together Community Reporting, lived experience and co-production approaches to create opportunities for disabled people to share their perspectives and experiences.

Creating space for different experiences

Disabled communities are incredibly diverse. People’s experiences of disability are shaped by many other parts of their lives, including race, culture, class, gender, sexuality and where they live.

However, conversations about disability and conversations about racism do not always happen together.

Recent political and social debates have also highlighted difficult questions about racism, migration and the ways in which the experiences and frustrations of disabled people can sometimes become connected with far-right or racist narratives.

Rather than avoiding these difficult conversations, the project aims to create space to understand them.

The intention is not to judge people or tell people what they should think. Instead, the work asks what disabled people themselves think about racism and anti-racism, what helps or prevents people from engaging in these conversations, and what could make anti-racism more accessible and meaningful across disabled communities.

Using lived experience to create insight

This approach connects strongly with People’s Voice Media’s wider Community Reporting work.

Community Reporting supports people to tell authentic stories about their lives and experiences. These stories can then be brought together through our Insight process, where lived experience is used to identify common themes, challenges, opportunities and learning.

For this project, disabled people are being invited to contribute through a survey and shared conversations.

The aim is to reach beyond the people and organisations who are already involved in equality or anti-racism work and hear from a broad range of disabled people, including people whose perspectives may not usually be represented in research, policy or organised disability spaces.

Take part in the survey:
https://touretteshero.typeform.com/to/bxYMB5Pe

From stories to change

At People’s Voice Media, we believe that gathering stories should never be the end of the process. Stories and lived experience can help us understand what is happening in people’s lives, but they can also help communities, organisations and decision-makers think differently about what needs to change.

Once the stories and survey responses have been gathered, the project will bring the learning together to identify key themes and develop practical recommendations. The ambition is to share this learning with Disabled People’s Organisations, Disability Rights UK, anti-racism organisations and other partners and networks.

There are also plans to explore bringing disabled people and organisations together for a roundtable conversation about the findings and what action could follow. Ultimately, the project hopes to contribute to a longer conversation about how disabled communities can challenge racism while building stronger relationships and solidarity across different communities.

Help us hear more voices

We want to hear from disabled people with different experiences, backgrounds and perspectives.

You do not need to be an expert in anti-racism, disability rights or equality to contribute.

We are particularly interested in hearing from people who might not normally participate in research or organised disability spaces.

If you are a disabled person, please consider completing the survey and sharing it with others in your community.

Take part in the survey:
https://touretteshero.typeform.com/to/bxYMB5Pe

You can find out more about Touretteshero’s Knowledge Builders programme here:

https://www.touretteshero.com/2026/06/09/knowledge-builders-the-first-cohort

If you are an organisation, community group or network and would like to help share the project or contribute to the conversation, we would also love to hear from you.

Through Community Reporting, we know that change starts by listening differently. This project is another opportunity to ensure disabled people’s experiences are not simply collected, but heard, understood and used to help shape what happens next.

We’re big fans of projects that really showcase the versatility of Community Reporting, and those that put communities and people at the heart of local decision-making in truly meaningful ways. So, you could say that working as evaluation partners on Bristol City Council’s Community Resilience Fund was a dream collaboration for People’s Voice Media. Read on to find out more about this people-powered project that put funds into the hands of grassroots local organisations, and how we used lived experience methodologies to assess its impacts.

Bristol City Council’s (BCC) Community Resilience Fund was a £4m grant fund designed to support community organisations with capital works, especially those that challenged power imbalances in the most deprived communities by improving accessibility, sustainability or offering other future-proofing benefits. The council worked very hard to ensure that people from the local community had a say in where the funding went, how it was allocated and how it was spent. This included having a panel of 100 community experts acting as “resident decision-makers”, supported by local councillors and experts in sustainability, accessibility and capital works. Community and voluntary groups seeking funding were guided through the grant-making process by the BCC Communities Team and by capacity-building organisations WECIL (West of England Centre For Inclusive Living), BSWN (Black South West Network) and Voscur, to ensure greater equity in the application process. But BCC also wanted to make sure that the evaluation of the funding followed the same process and centred community power and participation. That’s where People’s Voice Media came in!

Community Reporting for evaluation

From the panel of community decision makers, seven people were recruited and trained as Community Reporters. The training from People’s Voice Media gave them the skills to conduct video and audio interviews with the grantee organisations, using open questions to explore the on-the-ground experience of applying for the grant, how the money has been used, and what impact it has had on beneficiaries, staff and the local community. We also conducted sense-making sessions with the Community Reporters to help understand what the key themes were emerging from the stories gathered, which then informed the findings in the evaluation report. You can watch our short Impact Snapshot film for some of the highlights from the 23 stories gathered or find all the video and audio interviews here. Some of the headline findings from the Community Reporting phase of the evaluation process were:

• The CRF grant allowed community groups and organisations to meet diverse community needs
• The improvements funded by the CRF broadened and deepened the organisations’ reach within the community
• Organisations achieved greater financial resilience through cost reduction
• The CRF allocations supported strategic planning and futureproofing
• The CRF process was a positive, trust-based funding experience

Ripple Effect Mapping for evaluation

We also wanted to give the grantee organisations space to explore themselves what the impact of receiving the funding had been so far. People’s Voice Media facilitated Ripple Effect Mapping sessions with representatives from 20 of the community groups that received the funding, where they could explore the impact that the works funded from the grant has had on their organisations, individuals and society. (More about Ripple Effect Mapping coming up in a future blog!) A thematic analysis of the maps was then carried out, which identified the following key areas of change across the participating community organisations:

• Accessibility and inclusion
• Skills development and employment creation
• Income generation
• Environmental sustainability
• Support for mental health and wellbeing
• Improvement of community offerings

Evaluation findings

From all this detailed qualitative research, we were able to produce an in-depth analysis of the impacts of the Community Resilience Fund, and also a set of detailed learnings and specific recommendations useful to Bristol City Council and other local authorities or grant-makers looking to support community capital works projects in the future. 

You can read about these in more detail in the Executive Summary or download the Full Report.

If you are interested in finding out more about how People’s Voice Media can support your organisation or local authority to undertake evaluation in a way that prioritises the voice of communities, please get in touch. You can contact us at enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk.

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