Our Voices

People’s stories about their experiences provide useful insights into what is happening in their lives and communities. These stories are a valuable source of qualitative data that can be used to inform the findings of research projects, provide intricate understandings of issues pertinent to communities, be catalysts of change in service design, advise local and national agendas and policies, and much more.

The Our Voices project found innovative ways of curating people?s stories so that the ideas, messages and knowledge within them can be better shared with the people, groups and organisations in a position to use them to create positive change in communities across Europe.

A transnational partnership of organisations from the UK, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy and Poland worked together to better understand story curation through researching existing approaches to analysing stories and how the findings from this analysis is presented. With this knowledge, the partners designed a pan-European approach to curation that enables communities to use stories of their lived experience to pinpoint local, regional, national and international trends, needs and issues.

The partners involved in the project are:
Peoples Voice Media (PVM), United Kingdom: A charity committed to supporting people to bottom-up social change processes.
Comparative Research Network (CRN), Germany: An organization that pecialised in training activities within the fields of intercultural competences, intergenerational learning, mobilities and migration. COSV, Italy: An NGO active in the field of the International Cooperation to Development.
CRSMP, Poland: This association engages locally and regionally, primarily on rural development and rural development community.
Foundation Intras (Intras), Spain: A non-profit organization dedicated to high quality research and intervention in the psycho-educational field.
Changemaker AB, Sweden: A change agency who are an experienced actor concerning cooperation and
education with Swedish Folk High Schools and Higher Vocational Training programmes.

As part of the project we have produced the following intellectual outputs:
? a Digital Curation training programme/curriculum
? a Digital Curation toolkit/learner book
? An online Digital Curation resource bank

Using these outputs on a 5-Day training programme in Berlin, we trained 15 Digital Curators across the
participating countries. These Digital Curators have used the skills they developed on this training and the resources produced as part of the intellectual outputs to deliver curation activities in the settings in which they work. Through this work the emergence of a pan-European digital curation network has begun, which is supporting communities, particularly those that are marginalised or excluded, to use their voice to create social change. Learning from the project has been shared widely as part of successful multiplier events in the UK and Germany.