Within the CoSIE project, Community Reporting has been applied as a tool for co-creation. Lived experience stories have been used to inform the co-creation processes of the 9 pilots. The stories gathered during the Community Reporting activities were from people accessing services pertinent to the pilots’ focus and area of delivery, professionals working in public services and wider stakeholders such as NGO partners and other support services. In total, over 250 lived experience stories were gathered as part of the project.

Below you can find the summary video of Community Reporting and Co-creation in the CoSIE project.

 

There is also a playlist of video summaries from each pilot that present the thematically gathered stories.

They have also formed part of the project’s communications strategy and have also been used the stimuli used in workshops and events to share learning from the project. Specifically, it has been applied as a tool for insight, dialogue and reflection. The key impacts identified through applying Community Reporting in this way include:

• Providing an organisation with a better understanding of the needs of their target beneficiaries and enabling individual voices to be better heard
• Influencing individuals’ mind-sets and behaviours that leads to direct influence on service design and delivery
• Development of digital skills and knowledge of a new method that can be applied in the future
• Building communities and networks through using storytelling as a bridge between services and citizens.

You can also access the full listing of Community Reporting videos produced in CoSIE (Excel file).

A Tool for Insight

Community Reporting is an insight tool that broadly fits into the realms of participatory and empowerment research fields. It engages people who access services, professionals and other stakeholders to be a part of an insight-gathering and identifying process by sharing their stories and co-curating them into concrete findings.

A Tool for Dialogue

Community Reporting aids dialogue by providing people with the tools to use storytelling to engage in conversations with their peers and other people beyond their peer groups in the co-creation process. Community Reporter stories can be used as a stimuli for dialogue and as a communication aids to talk to decision-makers.

A Tool for Reflection

Community Reporting supports people to reflect on their experiences and the experiences of others. This pro-active, critical reflection provides people with the space and time to more deeply understand how they and others experience the world, and thus support people to identify how public (and other) services can better support their needs.

Originating in 2007, Community Reporting has been developed across Europe as a mixed methodological approach for enhancing citizen participation in community development, research, policy-making, service development, evaluation and decision-making processes. Community Reporting purports the validity of lived experience and knowledge-based practice in these fields. It uses digital, portable technologies to support people to tell their own stories, in their own ways and connects these stories with the people who are in a position to use the insights within them to make positive social change.

Community Reporting has three distinct components – story gathering, story curation and story mobilisation – based around the Cynefin decision-making framework for complex environments (Snowden and Boone, 2007). Through gathering, curating and mobilising stories, the methodology seeks to inform policy, processes and practice.