Our Voices in Berlin: Stories of Change Begins

A unique partner combination of 6 European organizations, 15+ trainers from several countries and 5-day curriculum to explore how digital story curation techniques can support communities to have their voices heard by decision makers and create positive social change.

Our Voices project, which aims to curate and mobilize stories of different people and communities in order to create important dialogues with local and European policy makers, is on its path to change the ways things are done.

Co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, the project has developed a digital curator training programme which will take place in Berlin from the 3rd to the 7th of September 2018, thanks to a robust research in terms of context analysis, experiential knowledge and needs assessment among the 6 European organizations involved.

But what is the aim of this programme? And what are the main activities?

The programme aims to support participants to develop knowledge and techniques on digital story curation and explore how these skills, expertise and understandings can be used in communities (especially the most marginalised ones) to support people to have their voices heard by decision maker and create positive social change. As part of the programme, participants will explore topics such as what is story curation, how to source and analyze stories, how to package and use them to create influence and what ethical issues need to be considered when curating stories. According to this, participants will undertake their own story curation project as part of the programme, alongside reflective and self-directed learning opportunities to consolidate learning.

After this 5-day curriculum, the participants will redeliver key elements of what they have learned to the communities in which they work in order to give them the possibility to share their stories with decision-makers. These pan-European pilot activities will test out a new way of working with the knowledge of experience and bridge the divide between citizens and decision makers.

According to this, particularly relevant sounds a quote of Joseph Brown: “It begins with one voice and builds with other voices. The collective crescendo is just now reaching a volume where we are all hearing and understanding”. We are sure that the development of this project will finally result in a society made by voices asking for the same thing: CHANGE!