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

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

Back in May, the EUARENAS project held its first Community of Practice (CoP) in-person session as part of a project meeting in Reggio Emilia. The CoP is made-up of folk from research, services, policy and communities across Europe and the group is interested in learning and developing their knowledge about how democracy works in local communities, and how citizens (in the broadest sense of the term – i.e., people who live in a place) and communities can be more involved in local democracy. As part of this session, we delivered an introductory activity that looked at the future of democracy in Europe – this blog shares with you some of the ideas from this session…

Democracy Now

When reflecting on what democracy feels like where they live and work, the CoP members noted points such as:

• Citizens feel removed from the political process – they perhaps don’t care or feel powerless to affect change 
• There was a sense that ‘European identity’ is being diminished 
• Growing complexity administration and bureaucracy causing blockages and disconnect 
• Truth and trust doesn’t feel valued 

A key question being posed, was is democracy really working? Are current structures really supporting the practice or principles of social equality – or are they unwittingly helping maintain inequalities? 

The future we’d like to see

Given that some of the points above point to a ‘crisis in democracy’, CoP members had some interesting ideas about how this could look very different. These ideas included:

• Citizens having more agency and involvement in democracy – moving to ‘deep democracy’, going beyond just voting and being involved in deliberation and decision-making 
• Having a ‘value-driven’ democracy 
• Local government with the competencies to support new ways of working with citizens and involving them in local democracy

Ideas for getting there

So, given that the CoP members would like to changes from the current situation, we spent some time thinking about how we might get there. Thinking and suggestions in this area were:

• Mainstreaming of existing practices such as participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, crowdsourced law – so that these become the new ‘status quo’
• Adopting test and learn approaches as a way that experimentation can be done and actively learned from
• Find ways of celebrating and connecting up the small changes that are taking place – this will help people see that progress is being made, even when it feels like things are changing too slow

The full results of this workshop will be combined with more detailed work done with residents of different cities across Europe to produce an insight briefing focusing on how people across Europe are currently experiencing democracy and their ideas for the future.

This will be released in Autumn 2022 – watch this space!

This week, members of the PVM team have been in Palermo, along with partners from the CONTINUE Project, to deliver training on Knowledge Exchange activities and share updates on work package progress. A representative from Gorse Hill Studios – our local partner based in Stretford, Greater Manchester – also joined us, for a week of shared learning and development.

We kicked off the week by exchanging key learnings from stakeholder interviews which partners had conducted with people in their local communities. The interviews were with a range of different people including teachers, youth workers and representatives from local government and explore their thoughts on how the COVID-19 Pandemic has impacted the lives of young people. Each partner presented the key learnings from each of the interviews, then we moved on to discussing how we could share this information with other people working in the field.

As part of the training, the group exchanged ideas for activities that could be used in the knowledge exchange event to facilitate discussion – ideas ranged from the Fishbowl technique to Focus Groups, creating safe spaces and World Café. We were then provided with a template session plan which each of us will adjust to suit the needs of the groups we’ll be working with.

Partners are now fully equipped to organise and deliver their knowledge exchange events. This stage of the project will be wrapped up by the end of September. Each partner will then write up a set of local policy briefings (using the learnings from the KE events) which will be shared in the hopes of influencing change.

A further Pan-European Knowledge Exchange event is set to take place by late November, combining the learnings from the local sessions and building further understandings – this will feed into a final Pan-European Policy briefing which is set to be released in the New Year.

The TNP took place the day after the training sessions and enabled partners to update on the progress of the project and discuss future plans.

Stay up to date with project happenings on the PVM blog and be sure to follow us on social media for more frequent updates.