Did you ever get that feeling that what you do has suddenly become a lot more personally relevant? I’ve always believed in “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Since my cancer diagnosis this adage seems all the more pertinent. And then the coronavirus panic set in and all of a sudden I realise that I am in a vulnerable category. So the reality is, that I am self-isolating. And yet I have to travel from my home in Huddersfield to Leeds every weekday for radiotherapy. A dilemma. I am so grateful for the NHS transport which gets me there and back every day.
If you read this blog regularly and follow my work elsewhere, you will know that I am an advocate of kindness and human compassion in everything we do, in public services and in all our inter-actions. And I’ve written in the past how these qualities get emphasised during incidents such as heavy snow and flooding and at times of the year like Christmas. The advent of Coronavirus has brought all this to the fore again, especially with the emphasis on older people and people with longterm sickness being more vulnerable. Social media, TV, radio and newspapers are filled with exhortations to look out for vulnerable people who might be self-isolating. Now supermarkets are having protected times for older customers to visit so they can avoid the panic-buying crowds. Heart-warming, isn’t it?
But how long will this public compassion survive the end of this crisis? Can we bake humanity into the actions of our organisations, institutions and policies. What if every single person evaluated their every action at work to see how they would feel if it was being done to them? What if their organisations supported them in making the changes necessary to make this a reality?
While you are here, can I please ask you to take a minute to subscribe to my YouTube Channel here
If you would like to support me to do more of my work in using Digital Storytelling, social media, and video for social good, please consider making a regular contribution via Patreon or perhaps, just buy me a coffee here. I would be especially grateful for this support as I enter my cancer treatment phase.
Last week I was in Cornwall. A long way from home for me. I was there because I was delivering some Digital Inclusion training to the staff of Coastline Housing on behalf of the Chartered Institute of Housing. Cornwall is somewhere I have visited a handful of times for professional reasons over my working career, and I have also been there for holidays 3 or 4 times. Distance is a relative thing. Cornwall is a long way to travel for me, living in West Yorkshire, but it may not be so far for you wherever you are reading this. The geography of Britain means that the North of England can feel a long way from the seat of power in London, but, in the North of England, at least we have the advantage of some relatively fast connections to get to London and elsewhere (don’t get me started on HS2, though). Cornwall, on the other hand, is a peninsula. I was reminded during one of the sessions I ran, that Redruth, where we were, is 3 hours away from Bristol. So, you might travel to Bristol and think you are in the South West of England, but you can keep going for another 3 to 4 hours and still not fall into the sea. To get there, I took a train to Leeds, then spent 6 and-a-half hours on another train to Plymouth, and then another 90 minutes on a train from Plymouth to Redruth. If you live in Redruth and want to visit London, it will take you 5 hours on the train. It’s a long way from London, the Midlands, or the North of England to Plymouth, but the train gets there relatively quickly. Once the train leaves Plymouth and heads over the River Tamar into Cornwall it moves a lot more slowly and stops at every little rural station.
I could have flown to Cornwall, it takes not much more than an hour to fly from Manchester to Newquay. But Newquay is still quite a long way from Redruth and the logistics of getting from one place to the other proved difficult. So, after considering all the options, I decided to treat the challenge of spending nearly 9 hours (each way) on trains as an opportunity to get some work done. And I resolved not to complain about it, reasoning that this was an everyday occurrence for the people I was travelling to work with. But, during one of the sessions that I ran in Redruth, participants talked about how their geographic location hinders them; how they find it hard to get to conferences and events; and one particular story about a good practice visit to the North of England involving two hire cars and a plane journey. So, it seems, that even living day-to-day in a “remote” location doesn’t mean you can take the travel difficulties in your stride. In fact it probably means that you just don’t have access to a lot of opportunities that others take for granted.
None of this will come as any surprise to anyone who lives and works in a rural area, or somewhere else at distance from the main sources of population. It is a real issue. And yet it is an issue to which we have the solution. But it is a solution which is still not being used anywhere near as widely and effectively as it could be. Scroll back to earlier in the same week, I was in London (yes that place, the centre of power in Britain) live-streaming the Patients’ Association AGM (video below). That organisation commissioned me because they wanted to take their first steps towards ensuring that their business is accessible by their members wherever they are in the country. In an era when we have the ability to reach beyond the rooms we are in and invite others to join our discussions, why are so many organisations still resistant? This is a genuine question. I’ve been live-streaming events for close on ten years now but there are still too many organisations who don’t want to open up their events in this way. Not only that, but it’s very evident that if you live-stream an event in the evening or at a weekend you get a lot more engagement. And I think that is because people don’t feel able to watch live-streams while sat at their desk in the office. It’s not true that engaging with an event through a screen is the same as being in the room, but it is a good option if you can’t be there. I think people erect unnecessary barriers to engagement with events online, and I think we need to break down those barriers. I’ve long believed that the ability to reach out to anywhere in the world using the internet should change the way we work. In the context of organisations such as the Patients’ Association, their mission is to involve people in influencing how health services are delivered, and that is more effectively done if they are reaching out to members wherever they are.
So I believe that we need to drive a big culture change. The first is in organisations who need to see that involving people who are not in the room is a major aid to their work. Beyond that, climate change means that we need to reduce the need to travel to events, and we can lower travel and accommodation budgets. Now I know that a lot of organisations make some or all of their income from running events, but I also believe that there will always be people who want to be in the room, and if live-streaming an event proves to depress numbers attending, then incentives should be offered to attendees.
The second element of culture change is that organisations should be encouraging their staff to seek out and watch live streams of events as alternatives to attending them. And sitting at your desk watching a live-streamed event should be seen as a perfectly legitimate thing to be doing.
And finally, we need to break down the reluctance that many people seem to have in engaging with live-streamed events. People are quite happy to watch “X-Factor”, “Strictly Come Dancing” and “The Great British Bakeoff” on TV and get immersed in the action, but they treat not being in the room at a conference as meaning it is not worth bothering with. Now, there may be a challenge here to event organisers to make their events more engaging, but that would benefit those in the room as much as it would those watching online.
Put yourself in the shoes of people living or working in areas where travel to most events is difficult or impossible. They are missing out on so many opportunities that the rest of us take for granted. And I speak as someone who regularly complains that events being held in London makes them inaccessible to those of us in the North of England. We owe it to those people to open up those events to remote participation. I want to go further than live streaming. I want to have rooms full of people in different parts of the country interacting with each other and providing active input into events. There are so many possibilities but we are being held back from realising their potential. So I am looking for partners to help me develop a comprehensive service to make crucial events in the public and non-profit sectors truly open and interactive. Contact me if you want to be part of this.
While you are here, can I please ask you to take a minute to subscribe to my YouTube Channel here
If you would like to support me to do more of my work in using Digital Storytelling, social media, and video for social good, please consider making a regular contribution via Patreon or perhaps, just buy me a coffee here
This is a brief post about why Digital Storytelling is so important to me.
I believe the world needs to change so that there are more opportunities for people to improve their lives, so that organisations are more responsive to people’s needs, and so that power structures are more representative of the diversity of society.
Every day I come across examples of great initiatives which are contributing to these objectives, but all too often they exist in isolation from each other and from policy and power mechanisms which could translate them into coherent social movements.
As an example, I have only today seen someone from a major organisation revealing in a tweet that they have only just become aware that Britain has a Housing Crisis.
The digital storytelling I do aims to shine a light on people and organisations doing great work to make the world a better place. The most powerful stories of all are those which enable the people who benefit from such work to describe and demonstrate the difference it has made to them.
Here are some examples:
Most people think that social care is in terminal crisis. While no one could deny there are huge problems, every day millions of people work to deliver the best care they can in challenging circumstances.
Policy makers have for years believed that Britain’s South Asian communities did not want professional social care organisations interfering in their family relationships. Probing beneath the surface can reveal the truth.
All too many people believe that a diagnosis of dementia is a death sentence. Events like the North Wales Dementia Meetups prove that people can continue to live fulfilling lives with the condition.
It is not true that older people don’t use technology. Some get great benefits from it, but most don’t. Here are some of those who do use it to enhance their lives.
This is a piece of work I did a little while ago working with Locorum, a West Yorkshire-based social enterprise which exists to help health and care services adapt to the needs of under-represented groups. Locorum were commissioned by Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group to undertake a survey of care needs among older Asian people and then to take the results of the survey and interview people about its findings.
Comments we received about this confirmed my views about the importance of this kind of storytelling. There were a couple of interesting points that came out in discussion about it.
Firstly, the video brought out a number of nuanced views that could not have been gained from a survey. Surveys are OK for capturing statistics, but they don’t get to the “yes, but” views. The issues we were canvassing people’s views on were often complex and the way the interviewees addressed them help very much in shaping responses.
Secondly, I believe it is important to capture people saying what might be quite difficult things to say in public. There is a received wisdom that South Asian communities are highly resistant to letting professional carers into their family relationships, and, if we had just relied on the results of the survey, that is probably the message that would have come through. But the interviews revealed that, because of changes in society, that view is changing. Families are struggling to provide the necessary care in some cases, and they are reluctantly coming to accept that outside help is necessary. But it is acceptable only on certain terms, which include the need for cultural sensitivity, and that it needs to accept that the family is the principal means of care and thus professional care is there to fill in the gaps and must step back when asked to do so.
I’d love to help as many people as possible to use this kind of storytelling in their work. If I can help you, please get in touch.
Last night I was at a great event at Salford University launching the “Fair Press for Tenants” guide for journalists, produced by Benefit to Society a collective of organisations which has come together to promote positive images of tenants to counter the negativity which often features in mainstream media. Their message is music to my ears as it is a theme I have been focusing on for the best part of the past 5 years.
It was a great event, and there were some wonderful people there. I think the guide is great, but, as I pointed out in the discussion, journalists are not the only people who need to be focused on with this message. Certain politicians have been cheerleaders in stigmatising social housing tenants, and the people who make programmes like “Benefits Street”, “How to Get a Council House”, “On Benefits and Proud”, and “Skint” are generally not journalists, nor are the programme commissioners at organisations like Channel 4 and Channel 5 who decide they should be made.
It was particularly interesting to hear from Eric Smith about the experiences of living in Wythenshawe, South Manchester when “Shameless” was being made, and the impact that had on outsider’s perceptions of the area. After the event some of us had a discussion about whether we could make our own programmes which are the antidote to poverty porn TV. I am definitely up for that if we can raise the resources. Who’s in?
Manchester is the taxi drivers giving people free lifts, the people opening up their homes to strangers, and the NHS workers coming in … pic.twitter.com/FCKFsUluSp
But, why does it take a tragedy for the mainstream media and the public in general to start paying attention to our dedicated NHS workers and other public servants? And, it has to be asked, why does a homeless person have to perform heroic deeds before he is offered accommodation?
Health workers and public servants are doing great work every day of our lives, and there are homeless people on the streets of every city who have not had the opportunity to respond in the way Steve did. Are they any less deserving?
People doing good work need to tell their own stories. Because there are few occasions when the mainstream media and public pay attention to them.
We are a society that believes in sharing, in helping each other, and in being there when needed. That is our story.
This is the start of the Campaign to get Social Housing tenants in the UK to register to vote and to be enabled to make informed choices at the General Election on June 8th 2017.
Social Housing providers are prone to complain that Government doesn’t understand them, despite the resources they invest in lobbying. And yet, large proportions of their 4 million tenants don’t vote. Let’s change this. Tenants voting and making informed decisions has to be the way forward.
Please see my video below launching the Campaign, there will be more to follow on this. In the meantime, please contribute your ideas for the Campaign in the comments below to add to these ideas already raised:
Social Housing providers to close their offices on Election Day and to deploy staff in helping tenants to get to the Polling Stations;
Organising Housing Hustings in venues accessible to tenants (and live-streaming them for those who cannot attend);
Displaying information on how to register to vote in Housing Offices and on Housing Websites;
Displaying information on where Polling Stations are in Housing Offices and on Housing Websites:
Please share this post and the YouTube video below to get the Campaign going, and use the hashtag #housingvote17 on social media. I have also started a Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/johnpopham to raise money for the Campaign and other things I do in the future.
I couldn’t possibly count the number of times people have given me the excuse for not pursuing digital transformation that recipients of services would miss the personal touch. Indeed I am repeatedly told that, for many the regular interaction with their care worker / housing officer / other professional is their only human contact.
I have 2 responses to this argument.
The first is, why are we not making more use of technology to reduce isolation and increase human contact? First priority in this for me is to assist people to use social networking to make new friends who they can subsequently meet in person. Second priority is to connect people together online, whether it be via social media sites, or via video conferencing.
My second response is this. What has our society come to if the only personal contact people have is with those who are paid to deliver a service to them? This is not right and it should not be used as an excuse for holding back progress. I refer you back to my first response for how we should be dealing with this. Let’s help people make and maintain real friendships, not rely on perfunctory transactions for a semblance of human warmth.
Here’s Paro the robot seal which has proven really good at connecting with older people.
Friday and Saturday saw two days of “Democracy Geeks” getting together in the town where I live, Huddersfield. This is the third year that Notwestminster has happened and the event just goes from strength-to-strength.
Technically, Friday and Saturday were separate events, with Friday being the Democracy Experiments Day, and Saturday being the main event. But there were enough people present at both days to make it feel that they were completely connected, and a Pechakucha evening on the Friday night, also brought some other new voices into the picture.
Friday
So, on Friday, we split into groups to work on particular challenges. I joined the group led by Helen Cammack which was looking at how local authorities could work with community groups as a conduit to public involvement and consultation. After some discussion, we agreed that it would make sense to use Helen’s interests.me platform combined with Kathryn Corrick‘s Represent to develop an online consultation mechanism via which community groups could collectively input to council policy. Helen and Kathryn went away to work on this, while the rest of the group worked on our complementary idea, which was to put together a video news bulletin on forthcoming council business which could be shown at community group meetings.
The idea was to to create a user-friendly package, summarising the business the council was due to deal with in the next month which groups could then discuss and respond to. Thanks to Spencer Wilson who joined the group briefly to help us identify where we could find guides to up-coming business from Kirklees Council.
The video we came with up is below. This is a kind of proof-of-concept. It’s a bit rough and ready, but, I think a fairly good effort given that we basically did it all, including choosing the topics, writing scripts for the section, filming it, and doing a basic edit in half an hour. I finished editing it on Saturday. I’d be really interested in feedback on this concept. I firmly believe that reports and papers are not the way to communicate council business to the public, and I think this idea has merit. What do you think?
After a brief break during which I walked the dogs, Friday evening saw a democracy-themed Pechakucha evening. There were some very inspiring talks, and a number of people who had never done a talk before in that format did a great job in grappling with it. During the evening I launched the Civic Story Factory. More of that later.
Saturday
We reassembled on Saturday morning, with a fair number of new people. The day kicked off with some Lightning Talks, and I was particularly pleased to see the in-coming Chief Executive of Kirklees Council (she started the job two days later), Jacqui Gedman delivering the first talk, and thus endorsing the Notwestminster approach.
Most of my focus on the Saturday was on the workshop I was running “Introducing the Civic Story Factory”, which launched my new social enterprise dedicated to unlocking the stories of great work done in the non-profit and public sectors. You can find notes of the session (largely compiled by the wonderful Louisa Thomson) here. I passionately believe that we need to tell the stories of what goes into delivering great public services to counter the negative propaganda put out by the mainstream media. The Civic Story Factory will help people to tell their stories and tell some of the best stories itself. Find out more about it here.
We had a great discussion in the Workshop and the actions we committed ourselves to were:
Further developing the concept of video summaries of up-coming council business as piloted in Friday’s session
Encouraging and facilitating the production of decision-summary videos following council meetings
Documenting the benefits to the village of Bradwell Parish Council‘s support for the village’s Annual Carnival.
If you’d like to work with us on making any of this happen, please get in touch.
Notwestminster 2017 was a great couple of days. Keep an eye on the site to see how the other experiments are progressing, and, if you haven’t made it to a Notwestminster event yet, don’t miss out on the next one!
Thanks to @LDBytes (particularly Diane) for some of the images used in this post
Loneliness and isolation are killers. There is increasing evidence of this. Indeed, research suggests that loneliness is more deadly than smoking 15 cigarettes a day or obesity. For the past 4 years, I have been working to address the situation by ensuring that older people can be introduced to new technologies in ways which are engaging and which demonstrate to them their usefulness to their lives, particularly how they can enable them to communicate with friends, family, professionals and support networks. And yes, I know that digital contact can be no substitute for face-to-face interaction, but, for people who have no interactions at all, it can certainly help them to build and maintain contacts that would not otherwise be available to them.
In an era when millions of us are keeping touch with our professional and personal networks online all the time, most of the people in greatest need of regular interaction are excluded from these benefits by their own lack of knowledge, unfounded fears, and the technophobia of the professionals who work with them. The work I have done over recent years with older people has clearly demonstrated that, if approached in the right way, their interest can be sparked, their fears can be overcome, and they can be guided on the path to regular online communication.
Every year at Christmas the media picks up on stories about people’s loneliness and isolation. Well, it’s quite a long time till Christmas 2017, but I am starting early on the road to making sure that by the time Christmas comes around, major inroads can be made to changing the situation of many lonely older people.
I am looking for partners to work with me on this strategy, and funders and sponsors able to help me make it happen. Much of what follows is recycled from an earlier post, which is still relevant, and which still forms the framework for my programme to end loneliness by digital means. This year it is going to happen. Contact me if you can contribute.
Digital Tea Parties
During the past four years I have run Digital Tea Parties in Leeds, Trafford, Whitby, Calderdale, and London, and there are a number of others in the planning stage. Digital Tea Parties are a great way of introducing older people to new technologies in a non-threatening environment. They allow the focus to be put on human communications and individual and community interests, rather than shiny tech. They are a familiar environment, in trusted locations, and they offer opportunities for those with a degree of interest to take the lead in introducing their peers to new gadgets. It is important in my view not to try to force people to use technologies they are uncomfortable with at the outset. Seeing others like them having a go can overcome that “tech is not for people like me” prejudice that often acts as a barrier.
Providing Connectivity
I have worked with partners to connect up a number of sheltered housing complexes, provide free wifi throughout and run a number of digital tea party-type sessions to kickstart residents’ use of new technologies.
Relevant Content
I am convinced that one of the barriers to new technology adoption is that older people struggle to find content that is of interest to them. And, in addition to this, I believe that activities such as slumping in front of the television actually contribute to older people’s social isolation by disengaging them from the world around them. Work at Digital Tea Parties, particularly the reaction to the pub crawl video at Urmston, convinced me that people need content to engage with that is directly relevant to them, as I expanded on here.
I am also seeking funding to run this Seaside Recollections project in which I would tour seaside locations guided in real-time by older people in pursuit of their memories of childhood holidays.
it breaks down some of the barriers to new technology adoption
it creates more content of interest to older people
it can change perceptions of older people by allowing them to present themselves as they were in their younger days
it contributes to project evaluation
Staff Digital Confidence
I am working on a number of initiatives to promote digital skills, confidence and fluency amongst staff working with older people. Funding has been very elusive for these, which is extremely disappointing, because I firmly believe that often staff act as gatekeepers, seeking to keep the older people away from technology because they are frightened of the consequences of letting them loose on it.
All of these are activities which can turn the tide in the battle to promote technology adoption among older people, and achieve the ultimate goal of breaking down loneliness and isolation. We need to roll these things out more widely and scale them up. If you can help, please let me know.
John Popham's Random Musings 