People's Voice Media is a charity that works with communities across the UK to support and enable them to tell and share their stories and influence services and issues in their local areas.
People's Voice Media (PVM) uses Community Reporting techniques and co-founded the Community Reporter Network which spans the UK and Europe and has 50+ active partner organisations from different sectors in the arenas of policy, research and services, and has trained over 2,000 Community Reporters and over 200 Community Reporter trainers.
Examples of their impact include their work with the Equality Trust to develop Community Reporting skills as part of capacity-building workshops. The Equality Trust are now embedding lived experience storytelling into their current work, writing it into new grant proposals for new projects, and influencing their partners in the Structural Inequalities Alliance to adopt storytelling in their campaign work.
They are working to grow and scale the Community Reporter model, and the communities and individuals as a network will be able to identify new opportunities, and develop connections and capacity, enabling the impact to be better sustained and built upon – independently from People's Voice Media's support. They have started this work already: training communities, teams and organisations in new locations; sharing knowledge with both the network and with other key stakeholder forums such as the National Centre for Research Methods; and are working in close partnership with existing and new partners such as the Equality Trust and Disability Rights UK.
Connection to Esmée's strategy
- Priorities
- Long-term outcomes
- Local people come together to determine equitable and aspirational visions of what they want their community to be.
From Larissa Fischer, Funding Manager, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation:
We were impressed with People’s Voice Media’s thoughtful approach to storytelling and their expertise in lived experience work. We are proud to support work which is at the forefront of a movement to shift the policy-development landscape to be more participatory and community-led.
From Hayley Trowbridge, CEO, People’s Voice Media
Here at People’s Voice Media, we are on a mission to change the world, one story at a time. We use Community Reporting – a form of digital storytelling – to enable people to use their own and their peers’ lived experiences as tools for social change. We work across geographies and communities, and often on a project-by-project basis.
The core funding that Esmée Fairbairn Foundation is providing will enable us to connect the learning from across projects, undertake strategic policy influencing work, and provide on-going support to our Community Reporters beyond the lifespan of individual projects. This will enable Community Reporters to continue to use their skills in the longer-term and embed storytelling as a tool for change in their communities.
This type of work is hard to resource, and for years we’ve been trying to do this in an ad-hoc, rather than strategic, way. Over the last three years, our Community Reporter network have continually asked for additional development opportunities and mentoring. They’ve also requested that we ‘join-up’ insights across different Community Reporter groups to maximise impact and influence on connected topics. This funding is crucial to us being able to realise these requests and achieve our vision of a more equitable world.
