At the heart of The People’s Newsroom is a wish, and in some ways a need, to bring people and communities together to connect and collaborate – to share stories which help us understand the world and build the kinds of futures that we might want to live in.
An important part of that has been bringing the organisations from our first learning journey together in person, to create and deepen those personal connections.
At our latest meeting – we came together at YARD in Birmingham, the “Art House” run by MAIA, to work on turning the theory we’ve been co-creating over the last year or so, into practice.
Perhaps it’s because we were in this space together, we talked a lot about the importance of having physical spaces in which to connect and collaborate. MAIA has YARD, Greater Govanhill has the Community Newsroom, and Opus and AM have both been thinking about what spaces for their communities could look like.
At their root, those conversations were grounded in a feeling that having our own spaces can help us support not just our own organisations, but everyone and every organisation we’re connected with.
MAIA builds its work around an infrastructure of Care, and that’s inspired other organisations in our group to think deeply about how they might embed Care into their work too – whether that’s around disability justice, or simply building care into every interaction.
Although The People’s Newsroom is about building a Commons for storytelling, or story-sharing, we’re also very aware that we don’t want that to mean a “flattening” or a homogenisation of our stories and perspectives. We’ve brought together organisations, from across England, Scotland and Wales – notably none from London, from where most UK narratives have traditionally been shaped. That’s highlighted how different our experiences are, but also the shared challenges we’re facing. Capturing both these things at the same time is part of the exciting challenge we’ve set ourselves.
An exciting new thought that broke into our conversations was around how the work we’ve developed so far doesn’t just apply to storytelling or story-sharing, but might also shape how we run our organisations. For example, we’ve talked about how our stories will never be written by just one person, because nuance and knowledge come from collaboration. But, historically in our organisations there has been one person who’s in charge of finance and holds all the wisdom, all the story, of our money. What if we changed that story, so that we were all part of finance, we were all part of architecture, we were all part of human resources. How would that change things?
The group discussed the visual imagery of the Commons; how to represent the collation of separate perspectives in one conversation, one action. The imagery of fragmentation was initially considered to represent this concept, although we later decided that a patchwork was more fitting, as Commons serves as the stitching together of different entities that already exist, to create something brand new.
We’re taking the time to finesse our values, principles and how we see our storytelling commons. We’ll be sharing the results of that work over the next few months in a series of resources. If those resonate with you, we’d love you to join our journey.