Dragons Voice CIC started working with People’s Voice Media (PVM) on the HOME? Project in May 2022 after discussions with Hayley (CEO of PVM). We feel privileged to be part of this project as we have worked with another organisation on a similar type of project. Initially we intended to gather stories from the BNO new arrivals from Hong Kong but this was not welcomed by that community as many feared for their safety and did not want to participate in a project that will showcase how they are living now since arriving in the UK.

We discussed this with PVM and Kath kindly agreed that we could look at alternative sectors of the Chinese community. In the end we recruited mainly from Mandarin speaker from mainland China who arrived in the UK within the last 10 years.

We found members of the PVM team to be very understanding and willing to adapt to our changing circumstances. As the director authorising the partnership agreement, I felt that PVM as an organisation stands true to its values. I have met Hayley a few times when I attended some training (early 2021) and at a conference way back in 2017. What came across was the philosophy of non-exploitation and letting people take control of their own stories.

How have the participants benefited from the project?

The participants who attended the Community Reporter training gained skills in doing short snapshot and dialogue interviews. They used a tablet to record the videos at the training sessions. The interviews were spoken in Chinese languages so they did not have to struggle with speaking in a second language. Some gathered stories after the training and uploaded them onto the Community Reporter website.

Those who attended the archive research training completed summaries of stories they found in the Manchester Evening newspaper. The focus was on finding stories on positive contributions from migrants. The skills they developed were firstly to locate the articles online and then sifting through the articles to find relevant stories. To conclude, they had to summarise and transfer core information onto the spreadsheet.

The training provided opportunities for strangers to meet up with other peers and transfer some of the learning into practice. Those who struggled with the archive research due to language were supported by those who had better English abilities. The project provided opportunities for participants to talk about and reflect on their migration journeys. Dragons Voice created 2 part-time posts for its volunteers, one to co-ordinate and the other to support in recruitment and organising activities.

Has Dragon’s Voice learned anything from taking part or from the stories?

There are many similarities in the stories, namely people migrate for better opportunities in life. There are always challenges to overcome in the initial transition, be it the weather in UK, availability of food they normally eat, language barriers or employment opportunities. The approach to interviewing in Community Reporting is very different to interviewing to mine for information, which is how we normally work when interviewing guests on our radio shows. In future we should be less focused on getting information we want and instead adopt a facilitative approach for the individuals we interview to tell their stories.

As a director I have learned to devise employment contracts for freelance workers but is not quite sure what to do when they pull out mid-way. I have had to step in and luckily as I had overall management of the project, I was able to pick it up without much trouble.

The Knowledge Exchange event puts the stories we gathered into a wider context and the roadmaps produced offers a sense of direction for future actions. It was good to meet up with other partners at the partners meetings, who worked across broader areas and are much more politically aware. Their comments provided different perspectives and food for thought.

At the conference in Liverpool, I found out about the other great projects that PVM is involved in and it opened my eyes to the broader work of community reporting.

I am painfully aware that Manchester has diverse migrant communities and it was with regret that we did not include these other groups in our project. We did offer the archive training to ALLFM presenter but there was no uptake advertising it on the volunteers steering group meetings and at ALLFM studio. We need to consider in future how to engage with other migrant groups within Manchester.

It is with much appreciation that Dragons Voice CIC was able to be a partner on this project. We hope to be able to work with People’s Voice Media again in the future.

Denise Yuen Megson

Director

Dragons Voice CIC

The HOME? heritage project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund has been focusing on the collection, curation, and dissemination of lived experiences of migrants (including refugees, people seeking asylum and other migrants) living in Northern England over the last 10 years. 

In August we pulled together the feedback gathered from the 5 Knowledge Exchanges in the 5 areas during Refugee Week in June and the Pan Northern Knowledge exchange in July in Liverpool. We are now collating the feedback to create roadmaps/action plans for each area including an overarching one for the North of England.

A total of 117 people attended the Knowledge Exchanges and people in each of the areas had the opportunity to hear people’s oral histories about their lived experiences of coming to live in the UK. 

The Knowledge Exchanges gave the wider community the opportunity to learn about this heritage, provoke discussion around the issues and people came up with ideas to input into a local road map/action plan that will help to – 

• disseminate the learning.
• create actions that help people to develop compassion and understanding. 

People said the event had inspired them to “get more involved”, “pay more attention”, “speak out more” and given them greater awareness. One expressed an intention to start volunteering. People demonstrated a shift in attitudes. One response described how they would “talk to people more positively about new migrants”, while another stated they would “be more aware of the importance to make people more aware of the similarities we share with asylum seekers, why they come and should not be a competition for resources, housing or jobs”. Another answer described how the event had left them feeling “more excited to be positive and keep working hard to adapt to life as a newcomer in the UK”. These responses show a positive personal impact on some of the attendees of the events.

The main key ideas that came up from the Knowledge Exchanges are:

• Campaigning for better rights for Migrants, Refugees, and asylum seekers – this includes the right to work, better housing, better financial help, better health support and more legal support.
• Connecting support services together more effectively.
• The need for specific trauma informed mental health support.
• Creating more activities for people to combat social isolation, especially for young men.
• Better targeted health care support for women.
• More ESOL support.

The feedback from the Knowledge Exchanges and the roadmaps will inform project resources that are being produced now, in phase 4 of the project, which is focusing on Widening Impact by producing –

• an educational toolkit – this will be a resource pack for organisations and individuals to use.
• a website – the stories, newspaper database and toolkit will be available from the website.
• a local newspaper story archive/database
• an animation – which will also be part of the toolkit and screened across the 5 areas in early 2024.

During each Knowledge Exchange there was also the opportunity for people to sign up to get involved with the project and many people have signed up. In response to this we are currently planning more Community Reporting training, Archive Research Training and Train the Trainers training that will happen from Oct through to March.

The  report to the COVID Inquiry has now been completed. It has been sent to the COVID Inquiry team and you can access the report here. Below you have a summary of some of the key points and links to the conversations that PVM had with people, to give you a preview of what the report includes. 

Links to extracts from 6 of the 22 participants

Keymn explains why having an understanding of the value of lived and living experience is training that healthcare professionals must have.

Miro explains why society has to re-think and understand disability differently.

Amanda tells us why COVID information was not fully accessible for Deaf people and what could have been done differently. 

Andy explains to Isaac the reasons for involving people with lived and living experiences.

Hameed discusses both the positive and negative aspects of the pandemic.

Baroness Brinton talks about health and social care problems that were highlighted during the pandemic.

Links to full conversations with all participants

The PVM process starts with individuals narrating their experiences, facts and feelings. We did this by talking to 22 people as part of the joint work with DRUK, so that the lived experiences of Deaf and Disabled people could be input to the COVID Inquiry.

There was one point in the process, where the information given by individuals seemed overwhelming. This was partly because everything felt important and relevant, but also because the task of determining key themes seemed a difficult or limiting process.  For example, when it felt as though every point people made was important, it then seemed like we might be trivialising the topic if we tried to distil it to a few main aspects.

However, the PVM process means that meaning emerges, although this doesn’t happen by magic.  We listen and highlight what we think is important. We might colour code, group together or count how often topics are talked about. We also consider how frequently a contributor might return to talk about a lived experience, as an indication of how strongly they feel about the issue.

For the COVID Inquiry work, we began with some open questions to allow people to give their lived and living experiences in a broad way and in their own words. As the work progressed, and by the time we had recorded 10 narratives, we were able to include some more focussed questions, e.g. Other people have said _____, did you find this was the same for you or what was your experience of this? There was definitely the need to balance the open questions against more focussed ones, because we did not want to lead the participants down a specific route, but we were aware that being able to give the COVID Inquiry team specific details would be important.

In the report we’ve included direct quotations from many of the people who shared their lived experiences. Where necessary, we’ve also offered explanations, based on the conversations and online sense making workshops we held. This is because we wanted to clarify for the Inquiry why particular aspects were different or difficult for Deaf and Disabled people. The key points from the report are:

·  There was confusing and frightening information from national government and local authorities to Deaf and Disabled people.

·  COVID both highlighted and exacerbated existing systemic problems and Inequalities (including racism, ageism and ableism) within statutory services

·  Even though there is legislation, little understanding exists about Deaf and Disabled people’s needs.The report is comprehensive and has had an emotional impact on some readers. We hope it will give people’s voices meaning so that the COVID Inquiry can make recommendations that will support Deaf and Disabled people, together with their carers. As Keymn Whervin stated in the foreword to the report: “The Inquiry must ensure that people affected by COVID have their voices heard, particularly in respect of how we co-produce health and social care”.

Isaac Samuels

We have been working away at an exciting EU project called Narratives of Impact since September 2020 and last month we had our penultimate meeting in the fabulous city of Milan. The partners from Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain and myself (UK) got together to finalise the video guides that we have made to go along with a toolkit created for NGO’s, charities, and voluntary organisations to use storytelling to measure impact.

The toolkit is designed to help organisations, teams and individuals to use storytelling to to see what is working and what needs to be improved. Applying storytelling methods can really help to improve data collection and more importantly help improve services and delivery. Using different storytelling methods can help people to engage with data collection and learning processes in a creative way, enhancing inclusion and access, as well as interest and commitment. 

Each partner has worked hard over the past few months to create their own video guide and it was great to watch the final videos together whilst eating delicious Milanese pizzas. Marco from @COSV hosted us in the COSV offices in Milan and gave us a warm welcome. It was good to meet the staff and see where they do their important work.

The next step in the project is translating the toolkit into Italian, German, Spanish and Polish ready to be published in June.

Kath Peters, project manager, PVM.

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