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