Equitable Practice in Lived Experience Storytelling: Challenges, Learning and Practical Ideas

People’s stories help us to make sense of our world. They help us to see things from different perspectives and to understand society. Recently, there has been an increased interest in working with lived experience stories as data, and an openness to co-production techniques.

Stories can help to bring different voices into research and decision-making arenas. They can enable people with lived experience to influence research agendas and findings, and shift power dynamics. However, we shouldn't think of this as a perfect solution.

While such work can help to address power imbalances and enable different perspectives to be heard, it can also exacerbate divides and problems. For example, when not approached with care, storytelling can reinforce systemic issues, further marginalisevoices, and re-traumatisepeople. It is therefore crucial to think carefully and be ready to question and improve these methods.

With this in mind, in May 2024, People’s Voice Media convened their 6thAnnual Community Reporter Conference. With support from the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), the conference was run as hackathon. A hackathon is an event where people come together to collaborate intensively on solving problems, creating innovative solutions, or developing new ideas. They foster creativity, experimentation, and rapid development of ideas. At the event, a group of 56 experts working with lived experience expertise in research from the academia, policy and practice came together at the People’s History Museum in Salford to tackle the central questions. These experts included people with lived experience, researchers, creative practitioners and storytellers, public engagement professionals, evaluators, and third and public sector workers.

The event explored the central question of: "How can we make lived experience storytelling practice more accessible and inclusive?"

It focused specifically on how storytelling could be accessible for people who do not use spoken word, inclusive for people who are neurodivergent and actively anti-racist. The event began with a range of ‘welcomes’ that decentered whiteness, platformed diversity and set the tone for a day of curiosity, creativity, and learning.

The hackathon was underpinned by a ‘design-thinking’ approach. Design thinking is a human-centered, iterative process used to solve complex problems by prioritizing empathy, creativity, and collaboration. It involves five key stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test, encouraging continuous feedback and refinement to develop innovative solutions (Brown, 2009). This approach places emphasis on understanding people’s experiences and encourages cross-disciplinary teamwork, often leading to more sustainable and user-friendly outcomes (Dorst, 2011).

The hackathon also used future-thinking methods to help attendees think beyond the present day. Such approaches help to “unblock decision-making and action on contentious, long-term challenges” (Ramos et al, 2019: 7). Activities in the hackathon included sharing of experiences, problem analysis, serious play and vision building, and storyboarding of future scenarios.

This report synthesises the results of the hackathon and is structured to highlight key challenges, learnings, and practical ideas for equitable practice in lived experience storytelling.