Note from an online meeting: Voice as Value
Summary
Voice as value creates personal agency and can be transformative for individuals.
When voice as value is placed at the heart of an organisation’s work that can also be transformative for society.
Organisations can:
Build relationships and trust over time with those they work with, and learn to listen to them properly.
Build alliances between people with direct lived experience and people who don’t have that experience but want to help bring about change.
Ensure that voices which would otherwise not be heard are listened to in the places where power is held.
More voices are being heard in COVID-19 but we need to hear many more.
We need many voices but one struggle.
In more detail…
Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the discussion. The theme of voice as value lies at the heart of the Better way Call to Action. This calls for a radical shift to liberate the power of connection and community. That power is created when
‘Everyone is heard and believed in, given a fair opportunity to thrive, and the ability to influence the things that matter to them.’
So this is not just about raising voices, it is also about being heard, being listened to. We therefore need action to create platforms and channels for people to influence what matters to them, and to ensure that organisations are genuinely listening to and reflecting the people they serve in everything they do.
Caroline also suggested that this is a moment when we are hearing more voices in the media, which were rarely heard before, for example care workers and nurses, and on occasion people who are homeless, people who are patients, people in difficulties. And we are also seeing a disconnect between the high-level statements by ‘men in suits’ and what people are saying on the ground about their real life experience of what is happening.
Margo Horsley, founder and former CEO of the charity Fixers pointed to the deficit of trust in institutions across the country. When trust declines, that affects legitimacy: if people don’t trust one person in an institution, they often don’t trust anyone in the institution, and become less likely to share their knowledge. As a result institutions (including charities) are failing to learn and benefit from their citizens, their beneficiaries, their clients, their customers, and the wider public.
The solution, says Margo, is Voice as Value: people trusting each other and people listening to each other to enable and value voice. Democracy is based on the offer of voice, but so often at the same time voice is taken away. Attempts are made to consult but people see through it quickly. They learn that when they speak it doesn’t mean anything.
So, can institutions reshape to make themselves ready to listen? They need to start with individual voice. When a single person moves us through their story, in the first instance the value is to the individual. They can tell they have been listened to because the institution changes what it does. The individual feels valued, maybe for the very first time. When a person feel valued, he or she begins to feel that they have a stake in society, they can value someone else when they speak. They start to think about solutions, about how to transform things for others. And they may begin to start to trust in institutions that they hadn’t trusted until now.
So individual voice creates an opportunity. But can society build on individual transformations? Margo saw the potential for this in the Fixers movement which began in 2008. It worked with thousands of young people which put ‘voice as value’ at its heart. Organisational boundaries were few and not visible. Young people described the organisation as having their backs and getting behind them. The premise of Fixers was that anyone 16 to 25 could do anything they wanted to providing they made a difference to one person. For the majority of young people who joined in, something had happened to them that they didn’t want to happen to someone else. Fixers worked with them so they could tell their story and supported them to meet the people they believed could take steps, with them, to create the change they wanted.
As a result, young people:
Moved from being isolated to being connected (finding others who relate to or understood their experience, developing awareness of themselves and others);
Moved from dependency to independence (they had authority and agency as an adult);
Moved from inaction to action (becoming confident, experiencing change in themselves and acting upon it);
Moved from the edge to the centre (they are the focus of positive attention, a source of guidance and expertise);
Moved from uncertainty to certainty (understanding their place in society; seeing others’ opinions and judgements; finding their identity and the value of their experience to society);
Moved from being controlled to taking control (seeing their self-identity as different from the circumstances they found themselves in, exerting agency and choice, discovering and creating options for change).
Margo believes that, not least at this time of Covid-19 crisis, voice as value can sit at the heart of transforming lives and that by enabling individuals to have their voices valued, they can contribute to a transformation of society: ‘A new framework of meaning where voice as value sits at the heart of social action.’
Polly Neate, CEO of Shelter agreed that trust is fundamental and hard-won for any organisation. Authentic voice is incredibly important, she said, and even more so in this crisis, and CEOs can play their part in this.
Individual stories have a vital role to play in influencing government. Polly pointed to four ways to exert influence, through evidence, social justice, personal stories, and economic argument. With the current government the last two are most important. However, some issues, including housing, become highly politicised along party lines. This is difficult to navigate, and brings risk, when we provide a platform for someone else to have a voice. Organisations need to be willing to accept such risk.
Polly advocated the principle of ‘many voices, one struggle’. Shelter has been working with media platform Tortoise, to allow unheard voices to emerge. One criticised Shelter, but that didn’t matter because the overwhelming case people made was about the disastrous impact of the crisis on individuals and on making people homeless, and that was what needed to be said.
Shelter has also been giving a platform on social media for front line staff. This empowers different voices within the organisation, diffusing power within the organisation.
There is an opportunity for transformation coming out of this crisis, even though this will be difficult, and will require a huge diversity of voices, and a real clarity about the nature of the struggle.
How can we create conditions to encourage voice and to listen better?
Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss the question,’ How can we create conditions to encourage voice and to listen better?’ Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:
Organisations should distinguish between different purposes of voice. For example applying voice to promote campaigns or demonstrate what an organisation is doing, is very different from enabling voice to have a say in improving lives, communities, and services.
Designers and commissioners of services need to hear voices right at the beginning, rather than when it is too late to influence and change.
Not everyone is confident to give their voice in a public forum. Stories are often personal, and some people will need support and encouragement. Video messages can work especially well for this.
How can an organisation truly listen? To do so implies rethinking mission and purpose. True listening is most likely to happen when organisations don’t have their own specific agenda, but rather create platforms which enable or facilitate people to advance their own issues, and bring about the changes they themselves want to see.
Listening well is deeply challenging for organisations, and requires a whole new set of skills, including the listening skills taught in community organising (eg Otto Scharmer on the four levels of listening). Organisations face risks of being confronted by demands they can’t meet or problems where they can’t offer a solution. Listeners have to learn to be honest.
We should recognise the legitimacy of the contribution both of people who have direct experience and who want to be heard, and those who don’t have direct experience but who feel strongly about the need for change. Both are needed to bring about social change.
Organisations can help people to tell their story, they are not architects of their story. They can build scaffolding outside the structures of power, helping people up to the right floor and the right room, so their voices can be heard. Organisations should not become gatekeepers that find a voice, polish it and coach it, and use it for their own organisational ends.
The use of the term representative is not helpful, better to think of advocates instead. Voices of lived experience are personal, can change over time, and cannot be expected to represent a whole class or category of people.
Sharing many stories and experience that otherwise wouldn’t be heard, has its own intrinsic value in helping to build momentum for change. The more the better.
We can recognise the power of listening to help people come together and create common cause and purpose. There are examples in the pandemic where the media are creating platforms for young people, for example, to get their messages heard. Young people on the ground feel they are being dictated to. For some people the current experiences are the ordinary and they don’t want that ordinary to return. This needs to be heard and understood if we are to change things for the better.
If people who have lived experience can’t convince people who don’t have that experience for the need to change, there won’t be a change. For fundamental radical change to happen there has to be a large number of people wanting it. So organisations which can provide routes for the voices of lived experience to convince others are very valuable. They shouldn’t be embarrassed about their own power but should use it in the right way, to help the people they work with become stronger, and to engage others with influence and resources.
Above all there is the need to build relationships with people with different voices and build trust over time. Not all organisations are good at doing this. Some don’t really trust their beneficiaries. They are not willing to take the risk that beneficiaries will tell them that what they are doing is not what they ought to be doing. This doesn’t produce an adult relationship.
Funders could explicitly prioritise organisations where voice and lived experience is at the heart of the work that is delivered. There are examples of this, but this is an approach which is not yet widespread among funders, and needs to be encouraged further.
Caroline concluded by saying that we will take forward some of these discussions in forthcoming Better Way activities, including cells on ‘sharing power to create new platforms and channels for people to be heard’, and another on ‘changing the narrative which sees people at the problem’. We welcome further blogs and video clips on these topics.