In The Netherlands, the stories that were gathered were from residents of a specific neighbourhood, professionals working in public services, people experiencing unemployment (including migrant groups), and employers. The stories gathered focused on (1) their reflections on the co-creation process and activities they had been a part of, (2) their experiences of unemployment and trying to secure work, and (3) their experiences of employing people and supporting people back into employment. You can access the stories here.

In the Dutch pilot – across the two sites in Neiuwegein and Houten – there were three main purposes for utilising the Community Reporting methodology:

An insight tool: To gather and curate insight stories about people’s experiences of being unemployed, getting back into employment and/or supporting people back into employment to produce a set of key findings on topics pertinent to the pilot site in Houten. This provided a needs assessment across a number of different demographics (i.e. long-term unemployed, migrant communities) and a mapping of the current context that the pilot is being established in.

A dialogue tool: To establish a dialogue between different stakeholders about the underlying causes of unemployment and to use this experiential data as stimuli for designing the interventions that the Houten site pilot would test. This supported the pilot to bring different perspectives together in the same space and think differently about the issue of unemployment than they had initially perceived it to be (i.e. more complex than a simple skills mismatch between employer and unemployed people).

A reflection tool: To reflect upon people’s experiences of the pilot’s interventions in the Neiuwegein neighbourhood in order to identify learning from both resident and professional perspectives. This provided the pilot with qualitative understandings of people’s lived experience of the pilot’s activities, from which key successes, challenges and opportunities for the future could be unearthed.

It’s not rocket science. It’s a basic thing that as a civil servant we tend to have an agenda – a well-meaning agenda but an agenda nonetheless. [Community Reporting] took us away from our agenda and allowed people to make their own.
Pilot Lead.