Community Reporting is a storytelling movement that was started in 2007 by People’s Voice Media, and it uses digital tools such as portable and pocket technologies to support people to tell their own stories in their own ways. Using the Internet to share these stories with others, we are able to connect them with the people, groups and organisations who are in a position to make positive social change. Central to Community Reporting is the belief that people telling authentic stories about their own lived experience offers a valuable understanding of their lives. Through creating spaces in which people can describe their own realities, Community Reporting provides opportunities in which people can:
- Find their voice
- Challenge perceptions
- Be part of a conversation of change
VOICITYS uses Community Reporting methodologies to enable communities to tell, understand and share their own stories on topics and issues pertinent to diversity in neighbourhoods. Our method aims to enable people to give a 360 degrees understanding of their world in accordance to a particular theme or topic, rather than just focusing on the theme or topic on which we are collating insights. These stories will be curated into short films and reports so that the key findings from them can be ascertained and used to facilitate dialogue on the topic, inform wider project findings, and support dissemination activities. The aim is to support residents from four communities across Europe to participant in storytelling activities on the topic of diversity and use the insights from these stories to inform decision-makers and influence decision-making processes.
What makes CR different from simple journalism, is that it concentrates on the stories that are behind the news and analyses this information through a special curation process. In this sense, CR is close to citizen science or participatory action research bringing citizens into the core of the research process.