A grassroots approach to gathering stories of lived experiences by training a network of "Community Researchers". The methodology emphasises authentic listening over traditional interviewing and involves collecting and transcribing conversations. The collected data is then processed through collaborative "Conversation Processing Workshops" to break conversations into "fragments" and extract "factors" related to social isolation and belonging. These factors are used to create a "Map of Belonging" (fuzzy cognitive maps), visually representing themes and interconnections, often with the aid of tools like Kumu and AI. This participatory analysis aims to shift power dynamics in research, ensuring that knowledge and benefits remain within the community and that findings are rooted in lived realities rather than abstract data points.

Training Community Researchers
As mentioned elsewhere, the underlying drive to create Community Researchers was to create a cadre of ‘good listeners’ within the community – to gather stories of lived experiences. A lot of work done...

Methodology not Ideology
Developing a workshop-based program to learn what kind of understanding and ideas evolve when we start from individual experiences. After the enthusiasm of finding that many people were interested in ...

The People's Assembly Spring 2023.
Turned out to be quite a controversial thing holding a People's Assembly just before Purdah. It was naïve of us to think that a person's political beliefs could be assimilated into community work. Tur...

Making Sense of Belonging: From Insight to Action through Community Research
“There is massive value in the way that that has brought people into what it means to research and gather information and data…even if they've just touched on it…you can take some story of like, Marga...

Hope in The Heart Exhibition Spring 2022
Hope in the Heart brought together artists with lived experience of poor mental health to share their thoughts in a reflective way with professionals. It was one of our first attempts at bringing diff...

Real Big Conversations March 2023
After a host of small conversations carried out in churches and small groups, people in Plymouth came together for a Big Conversation hosted by Transforming Plymouth Together. Topics that were high on...

Neighbourocracy Autumn 2022
28 people, including 6 young people, attended a gathering in Autumn 2022 with Nate Whitestone from A Fairer Society and Joseph Rathinam from the Neighborocracy Movement. Joseph is a South Indian commu...

Processing conversations together
You might be wondering what happens to conversations once they are collected? Well, I am happy to say that back in November 2023 we reached a significant milestone. With the support of Health Determin...

Creativity in the face of Stuckness
It's common for emergent work to become stuck. We had been trying to build momentum for grassroots work in a local community to demonstrate how partnership work could really make a difference at a hyp...

The Party June 2023
You could tell we were up for a party. Despite it being a baking hot evening, we crammed over 100 people together for food and relationship building. Young people and residents rubbed shoulders with p...