Over the last four months of unprecedented disruption and suffering under the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been some fantastic efforts by community and voluntary organisations to capture the everyday struggles of people under lockdown. ‘Storytelling’ has become a popular approach for encouraging people from a wide range of backgrounds to share their experiences of life…
I read with great interest Katherine Trebeck’s blog for Open Democracy proposing a “new economic system”, based on valuing collaboration, community and the reduction of inequalities. She describes being called “naïve” by a fellow panellist when presenting her vision at a recent conference, and recounts her critic’s argument that if we just “look at the…
The importance of representing the voice(s) of the public in decision-making has never been more widely acknowledged. We can be proud of the shifts in recent decades that have helped to embed meaningful public participation and engagement in a range of fields in the UK, including local and national policy making, health and social care…
From my own experience conducting research with local authorities and charities over the past few years, I’ve come to recognise a rather common picture relating to how these organisations use data in their work. Unsurprisingly, in this era of impact evaluation and cost-effectiveness assessments, numbers – of service users, of outcomes, and of pounds spent…