Barriers to Participation

This next set of mini-modules will all look at the barriers that communities often face when sharing information and these can stop people from speaking out and being heard.

We strongly believe that these barriers exist due to the inflexibility or social and institutional structures and poor design of technology and project frameworks.

This can result in individuals coming up against challenges due to an insistence on higher levels of literacy and the inaccessibility of communication tools.

While ownership of mobile phones has increased, many lack the electricity to charge their devices or struggle to find the money to credit them. Geography also plays a part, with Those in rural areas may feel they don’t have an easy way to contribute to decisions that are made in the city. Others feel social stigma is so great that they would not be listened to if they spoke.

Over the years, we’ve come to see a commonality among these barriers and we have grouped them into a framework we call the 5Cs – Which are Connectivity, Conviction, confidence, capacity and craft.

While these can be significant, we have seen how Community reporting can be well designed to overcome these barriers – help to build people’s self esteem, introduce new and simple skills and tools, and connect communities to digital spaces where their stories can lead to real change.

In the next few videos we will share a little more about the 5Cs, and in the next series we will look at the ways in which we try to lower them.

It is such a myth that the whole world is online and digitally engaged. While there is of course increasing availability of affordable mobile handsets, and access to wifi and mobile data is indeed on the rise, the internet is only currently accessible to less than half of the global population, and 10% of the UK population remains offline.

The internet is perceived as becoming more inclusive and while we welcome a positive shift towards more diversity among online voices, there are glaring demographic and regional holes in online dialogue. Early adopters of new digital technology and media platforms tend to be disproportionately white, male, middle-class and well-educated.

Many of those with disabilities have almost been designed out of digital engagement – with little or no effort to look at universally accessible tools.

As development moves on, there may well arise an even more significant digital divide. The key decision spaces that shape our world have become increasingly digitised, with everything from parish councils to the UN now engaging with communities and sharing information almost exclusively online.

There is a crucial role in ensuring those with little or disrupted access are not left without a means to share or receive information.

Since we started Radar we have been excited about finding and using tools that use simple accessible technology to create brilliant and power reports. As you heard in the previous module, we’ve harnessed SMS and Voicemail is reporting tools to overcome some of those digital divides and in the next series will also look at this again so that it’s absolutely clear how you can harness technology for accessible community reporting.

The other wonderful thing is that community reporting is facilitated by technology but driven by good old human conversations. We focus a lot on helping community members to interview others to gather information from the groups around them. This can extend ‘connectivity’ well beyond those with internet access or mobile devices by ensuring that those voices are still captured and shared.

To recap, connectivity remains a big issue for many if not most of the world. It is also sadly still an issue for a significant swathe of the UK. As the world increasingly shifts online, we must connect the spaces that are currently disconnected- adapting the simplest mobile technology can facilitate community engagement and meet communities where they are so they can capture what they see and experience.

This next barrier is the one that is often the most significant for most of the communities we work with. A lack of conviction – a lack of belief that anything can change..

I often talk about this in terms of an iceberg. When you’re looking at an iceberg in water the large icy structure you see is only a fraction of the iceberg itself. The majority exists online waiting down the mass of ice. To me, a loss of conviction it’s like the bottom of that iceberg. While everyone is looking at the top bit above the water to tackle and fund, the loss of conviction remains the single most entrenched and difficult challenge to overcome.

It can be hard for individuals to believe that sharing their experiences will result in meaningful change. Social marginalisation or a breakdown in trust in institutions can lead to an understandable fear that sharing a story may create further isolation, criticism or disrespect.

If you remember we talked about extractive forms of information gathering, that suck out info from communities without any feedback. This can leave people feeling used, like they were just a little dot in a sea of data.

Even when there is decent feedback, people who put energy into projects again and again without seeing any change I likely to become weary of that process, as are those who are leaned onto heavily by organisations to become advocacy superstars, being called upon to tell their story again and again until it starts to lose meaning for even them.

The media of course is infamous for telling narrow stereotypes – single stories that cause deep damage to both the storytellers and our social fabric. Communities may not trust institutions who have, in the past, distorted their words in order to sensationalise a story, or taken their insight and never told them where or when it was shared, and what happened as a result.

So it is possible that, even with the best intentions, a potential collaboration by any institution may be viewed with suspicion by any participant, but particularly if they have previous experience of being poorly treated or misrepresented.

In the next module series, we will look at the role of co-design and how it can help ensure participants feel engaged at the very early stages of planning and design, before agendas are set and scripts are written. We will look  at how to acknowledge and ease concerns and build a sense of shared ownership

Of course this is not quick work -it can take a great deal of time to build trust and conviction. As local partners and services you may already have a trusted connection with communities to build on and that can be incredibly helpful. If not, or if you feel you need to develop this, community reporting is a gateway to both preparing and nurturing community trust and conviction.

The third barrier is confidence. There is so much incredible insight that communities hold, but many feel that they do not have the confidence to share it – perhaps they have felt ignored in the past when they tried to speak out, or feel that they do not have the right tools or platform to support what they want to say. This lack of confidence can mean that insight, stories and experiences, that have immense value to wider society are often left untapped.

Unfortunately, in a society where the dominant narratives are shaped by elites, the voices of marginalised groups and individuals are routinely ignored.

When people don’t see themselves reflected in the media, or in positions of power in the institutions that they routinely interact with, or those that they do align with are routinely demonised by the press, it can erode a sense of self worth.

Boosting skills can help to raise self-esteem but there is a deeper level of work needed to undo negative cultural and social messaging and ensure that each person feels able to claim their space and raise their voice.

This can be done through group work or individual mentoring and requires time built in to projects to listen and respond to a participant’s unique circumstances. This stage of the process can pose real challenges; how far can this go before it becomes a therapeutic process and requires a higher level of professional support? How to ensure that no harm is done by raising expectations that individual stories may result in change?

In addition, predicting the amount of support someone is going to need is difficult, particularly as emotions can run high when sharing vulnerabilities and painful experiences.

As a result, confidence building requires boundaries that bring clarity to the roles and relationships. Setting out clear expectations of the collaboration on both sides, from the outset, is really important – both so that communities feel confident and trust in the process of sharing and being listened to, and organisations know that there is a structure in place to support them. These relationships should retain an element of flexibility to be able to respond with humanity when challenges arise.

There is a lot to consider here, so don’t feel like you have to take this all on yourself. Working with a referring partner is critical here, as they should have services and support infrastructure in place to help. If not, this is something to consider at the very earliest stages of the planning.

Finally, feedback plays an important role in building confidence. Seeing work published on a well respected platform can give people a real boost so it’s vital to build in time and budget to ensure participants are given a chance to see the final publication and hear the reactions of their audiences.

Much of Radar’s work begins by enhancing individual capacity through training. This capacity building is considered a primary step towards a broader objective of participation, rather than an end in itself.

It is also essential to improving the quality of the reporting and the integrity of the collaboration. The training allows space to introduce key values and ethics that underpin good information-sharing, as well as offering a chance to understand participants’ motivations, challenges and ideas that guide the project.

Introducing the concepts of reporting and storytelling to communities can be a real pleasure as many of the skills required are already innate in social interaction: inquiring after friends and family, witnessing exchanges and events, hearing about the latest issues from community leaders, questioning local politicians or service providers over decisions and actions. Many of those participating will already have had to be their own advocates and rise up against prejudice or a lack of justice..

Capacity-building for reporting must remain responsive as each participant will also bring unique challenges. A lack of formal literacy or fluency in an official language can pose additional challenges, while certain disabilities can raise additional barriers to learning and engagement. Taking time to understand reporters’ capacity challenges and finding the right tools and training mechanisms to mitigate them is key.

Radar’s own training modules have been co-developed with alumni and are designed to be deliverable at the community level, and among groups with little formal literacy and accessibility needs.

The training can be delivered over several days or broken up into shorter sessions over a number of weeks. The core modules cover the building blocks of community reporting, community mapping, news gathering, mobile tools, interviewing techniques, ethics and privacy.

Alongside the more traditional handbook, there are remote training modules that can be shared via SMS, voicemail or apps, and we have an online training portal for those who can access it.

There is a focus on fostering voice, leadership and networking skills, as well as collaborative values. These skills are transferable and have helped previous trainees to get placements in higher education and gain employment.

Despite the advances in mobile equipment, not all of us are leaping into creating BBC media without mobile phones. If you’re anything like my mum, you’ll be sending photographs with your finger over the lens, family photos with somebody cropped out, recording voice notes or voicemails The people can barely hear due to background noise I hand over the microphone. Beyond these little technical glitches, how many communities have a sense of what audiences really want to hear and see, how to capture attention and follow a story arc. These may seem strange to consider when talking about community stories, there is little point of people telling them if no one is going to listen or watch.

For this, we need a level of craft, which are creative and professional skills that can transform community stories into a broadcastable media feature, One that makes people sit up and listen, feel angry, inspired, or hopeful.

Now if you cast your mind back to our early videos, you may remember us talking about the Arab Spring, the period of civil uprising that toppled so many dictators in the Middle East and North Africa. Well the citizen journalism from that time, and particularly from the Syrian war that started soon after, completely transformed the rules around what was broadcast-able by media houses.

The mobile footage was grainy and shaky, blurry and filled with background noise of war and revolution.  Nobody cared because we were seeing something on fold that was so unique and so incredibly important, that nobody minded about the lack of professional craft in how the stories were delivered.

This has helped to widen the scope of who can submit citizen content to the media and softened journalistic approach to showing a broadcasting community storytelling. That said, there is often an extra struggle to get media houses or governance institutions to genuinely listen to the stories of the most marginalised, particularly those living through the quiet crises such as dementia, homelessness, social isolation.

injecting a level of creative craft and professional skills can really boost the chances of that story reaching the widest possible audience.

In this way, there is a valuable partnership between those with professional experience and those with lived experience and community networks to collaborate. Perhaps the community member tells the story, whilst a professional camera person shoots it, or a group submits a series of voice reports, and a professional editor cuts them together. Community members can remain the lead, the creative drive, and the voice, whilst those with professional skills are merely facilitating the framing and production of those stories.

We call this Co-production in module three we’re going to look at this in a lot more detail. for now it’s just nice to reflect that Collaborating through co-production can be hugely satisfying for communities who may be used to being overlooked or simply seen as a ‘source’ rather than a producer or presenter.

When this works well, reporters come away from a project with enhanced skills and something special they are proud to share. For broadcasters, having the genuine voices and perspectives of those most affected by an issue presenting and advising on the production process, is invaluable.

Since the start of the Covid pandemic, we have been working with organisations and services to help them urgently find a better way to remain remotely connected with their communities. Of particular urgency was a request from homelessness peer support charity, Groundswell, who wanted to monitor the unfolding experience of those in their network facing homelessness.

From our collaboration has emerged a unique and powerful community reporter network who are tracking their experiences of homelessness during the pandemic and lockdown responses.

But as with every new community network, there were (and still are) a number of different barriers that needed to be addressed. Let’s think about those 5 C’s.

Firstly – connectivity – due to the nature of the pandemic, and engaging with a community who are already fragmented, we needed to come up with a technical solution to be able to interact with the network remotely. We used our Radius platform to set up a centralised system that has helped to remotely train the network in the basics of citizen journalism to build their capacity. The two-way conversational system enables them to submit SMS, video and voice reports from the streets, hostels and temporary housing where they have been living, as well as receiving feedback on their reports.

To help build up confidence, each reporter was paired up with someone from the peer research team at Groundswell who also has lived experience of homelessness. It is these relationships that have become the absolute heartbeat of the project, with genuine friendships emerging that have been a real lifeline for a number of the community reporters throughout the pandemic. One reporter credited his involvement in the project with keeping up his confidence which enabled him to get a job.

The reports were fed directly into NHS England in the form of briefings to help inform their Covid response and a co-designed microsite was also set up so that the reporters could have a public-facing platform to publish their stories and ideas, without the need to be filtered through a traditional media platform.

Finally, In terms of craft we paired up two of the reporters who had sent in audio reports with a professional illustrator and animator to create two incredibly powerful animations that help bring their words to life visually. The links are in the description below if you would like to watch them.