What is Community Reporting?
In 2007, People’s Voice Media launched the Community Reporting movement and began to build the Community Reporter Network. Community Reporting is a peer-to-peer, digital storytelling method that supports people’s participation in research, policy-making, service development, and decision- making processes. The Community Reporter Network now spans the UK and Europe. It has 50+.active partner organisations from different sectors in the arenas of policy, research and services, and has trained over 2,000 Community Reporters.
The Community Reporter network puts lived experience at the heart of service improvement, policy development, and research practices.
Community Reporting Cycle
Community Reporting enables people to tell their own stories, in their own ways through text, photos, audio and video. It has three stages:
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Gathering Stories: Supporting people to share stories about topics that matter to them.
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Curating Stories: Identifying the key insights in a set of stories and packaging the findings.
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Mobilising Stories: Connecting the story insights with people in a position to make change.
This cycle is loosely based on the Cynefin framework for decision-making in complex environments (Snowden and Boone, 2008).
We apply Community Reporting in three key ways:
- Research: We use Community Reporting as a method to work with lived experience as data, enable people’s involvement in research, and set research agendas.
- Training: We train individuals, communities, services and institutions to use Community Reporting as a tool for positive social change within their own context.
- Consultancy: We apply Community Reporting as a tool for evaluation and learning to support service, community, and policy development.
We share what we learn and build capacity in individuals, communities, and organisations.
Community Reporting is a framework through which people’s stories are transformed into real-world change.
A paradigm shift is happening. Community Reporting meets emerging trends and direction-changes in service development, policymaking, and research approaches. These sectors are keen to adopt more ‘co-productive’ techniques and to use lived experience as a form of evidence. The policy landscape is changing to accommodate this shift in thinking and practice.
Community Reporting is adaptable to different contexts. It can be integrated with other approaches such as foresight and impact evaluation. It offers a viable, tried and tested solution to working effectively with lived experience.
The time for stories is now.
Be Part Of The Story
We are looking for people, communities, and organisations to help us on our mission to create a fairer, more just world. If you’d like to be a part of this story, then get in touch and join our conversation of change.
Download: Our Brochure
Visit: https://peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk
Check out: https://communityreporter.net