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.