What is Community Reporting?
Community Reporting is a community based movement that started in 2007 by People’s Voice Media. It uses mixed methodological approach for enhancing citizen participation in research, policy making, service development and decision making processes. It uses digital portable technologies to support people to tell their own stories, in their own ways via peer-to-peer approaches. It then connects these stories with other people, groups and organisations who can use the insigths within them to make positive social change in communities and larger society and system.
Central to Community Reporting is the belief that people think telling authentic stories about their own lived experience offers a valuable understanding of their lives.
Community reporting has three distinct components, based on the Cynefin decision-making framework for complex environments (David Snowden, 1999), as depicted in the diagram below, also visible on the website of People’s Voice Media:
At the heart of the approach is the support people in telling their story, giving them a voice, but also engages active story listening. Listening to people’s stories means building connections, awareness of shared human sensitivity and vulnerability. Telling and listening can only be realized if values such as mutual respect and trust, reciprocity and awareness of existing power relations are taken into account. In fact, in community reporting people tell their stories, but by sharing them, they also envisage change and learning.
Exercices
1. Look at the following video: What is Community Reporting Network?
and have a look on the website of the Institute of community reporters, where community reporters share their stories on many differentiated topics https://communityreporter.net
2. What is Community Reporting
Before starting: shared purpose
When using community reporter techniques in VET trainings, it is important to focus first on the shared purpose of the intervention and shared values in the group. In fact, community reporting as a process shows parallels with participatory research. You can use community reporting techniques to:
1) Investigate and determine what is the vision of all parties in the organization, project about used concepts, position papers, rules, projects or shared values stemming from that.
Example: In NACCS we worked on our own understanding of the notion of narrative accountability by using community reporter techniques. This helped us to explore what is our view about narrative accountability, what the concept and practice mean to us and in our organizations.
2) Evaluation of projects and making future plans in co-creation with all stakeholders involved. You may use community reporting as a narrative evaluation tool after realization of projects. In NACCS, we explored the use of community reporting techniques to work with participants in our projects and collect their stories (accounts) of events. We would use them to create a narrative account of projects, thus contributing to a narrative accountability reports and evaluations.
We invite you to use the techniques learnt in modules 1 and 2 and unfold them in a community setting and as a shared activity in groups. They may be small groups or big groups. We propose the approach of Community Reporting to you, a peer to peer storytelling methodology, in which people within the community help eachother to tell their story. It helps them with community reporting approach to contribute to positive change.
Narrative accountability is the final result and account made with all contributing persons or parties, so that positive dialogue can contribute to shared responsibility for future projects and ideas, transformed in the writing or visualizing of a common narrative account, giving an idea about social impact of projects next to the measurable KPI’s. Narrative accountability enriches the traditional ways of impact measurement by including narrative and reflective components that enhance positive change.