Share your story with National Voices

National Voices, with the help of PPL, AYUP, and Social Spider, are next week ‘soft’ launching an online platform on which anyone can upload writing about their Covid-19 experiences.

They are opening up this opportunity to everyone, but are weighting their communications towards targeting people with ongoing health and care needs, people living with mental or physical ill health or disability.

They believe this is necessary, because the experiences of people with the most significant needs (for example people who are shielding) are curiously absent from mainstream discussions about Covid-19, and about how we might exit from this very acute phase. They believe that bad, unfair, ineffective decisions will be made if they don’t base their design and delivery of services on the lived experiences of a diverse range of people.

Next week, they will launch a web platform that enables this insight gathering, called OurCovidStories. They will also ask people who contribute to consent to being contacted by them for further work, for example people who share a particular experience (mental ill health, bereavement, digital services, shielding, relying on carers etc). They hope this will help them to make helpful but challenging contributions to policy processes for how the NHS and Government will respond to Covid-19 next.

If you think you know someone who has a story to tell, or if you’d like to know more, please email [email protected]