Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to go to Valladolid in Spain to get together with our European partners on the Narratives of Impact project. Valladolid is charming old University city, and it houses one of the partners and the host for this transnational partnership meeting, Fundación INTRAS.

Fundación INTRAS is a non-profit organisation dedicated to research and intervention in mental health in the region of Castilla y León, Spain. 

The meeting was held so we could review the video guides that we have produced for the final toolkit and decide on final decisions for the final edit. But we also had the opportunity to –

• meet with stakeholders who are linking into the project 
• explore more creative storytelling activities 
• look at Quality Indicators that help us have a framework to measure success against.

One stakeholder is Abi Horsfield from Collective Encounters, UK. She brought some creative energy along and shared some different creative activities and methods that can be used to help measure impact. Encouraging ‘active listening’ with an activity called Concentric Circles this helped us to really consider the questions that we ask and how well we listen.

Elisha Chiesa from the Consorzio Comunità Brianza in Italy, showed us an interesting presentation about the important EPPICA project that she is working on. And we also heard from Maria from Zamora Rehabilitation Centre outside Valladolid, who showed us a film about how they have been using lived experience storytelling to support their work.

The energy and interest from these stakeholders have emboldened the project and demonstrated how relevant the toolkit and video guides that we are producing are. It’s great to have feedback and interest from other proactive organisations that are doing such important work.

As well as having the contributions from stakeholders we also explored the best way to use Quality Indicators and how to embed this when measuring impact using storytelling. We looked at what specific Quality Indicators each partner organisation would use to measure success against helping each organisation to build a Quality Indicator framework in which to measure success against.

Over the 2 days in the daytime, we were busy being developing creative and robust ways to measure impact, in the evening we were entertained by the fantastic Christmas lights that were throughout the streets of the city and were all lit by solar led lighting. This added a touch of festive magic to the whole experience without adding to climate emergency. What a delight.

Kath Peters – PVM Narratives of Impact project manager

@COSV, @CRN, @digitalstorytelling, @erasmusplus, @INTRAS, @livedexperience, @measuringimpact, @narrativesofimpact, @SNDE, #communityreporting, #livedexperiencestorytelling, @collectiveencounters

NARRATIVES OF IMPACT PROJECT – CO-CREATING A NEW VIDEO GUIDE TOOLKIT WITH EU PARTNERS IN BERLIN

Getting together with our European partners on the Narratives of Impact project is always interesting, productive and dare I say it, fun.

The last meeting we had in Berlin in May was all of the above and more. As part of the project, we are co-creating video guides to go into a ‘toolkit’ for Third Sector organisations to use storytelling as a way of measuring impact. 

In Berlin we ran a ‘living lab’. This is where we test and try approaches and methodologies out. This living lab focused on planning the video guides to be ready to film in July – September.

We spent 2 days at the Atelier Talk Studio. This is an art and design studio and it was certainly the right environment to get creative and to visualise the video guides. Together we worked on scripts, storyboards and generally planned the video production. Leon, one of PVM’s tech wizards joined us online and gave everyone a super presentation in the do’s and don’ts of video production. 

Challenges we have with co-creating video guides in this way are ensuring that they have a consistent design and look. Getting together to plan is a way to check that we are all on the same page.

It was satisfying to come away with a sense of achievement and know that we are all ready, nearly, to start to film.

Kath Peters – PVM Narratives of Impact project manager