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Participation and Involvement

Our Active Voice projects are all based around the concept of ‘Participation and Involvement’

You may have heard of the term ‘Participation and Involvement’ but do you really understand what it means?

In a nutshell, it refers to any situation where people are involved with service planning, design and delivery.

What this means in practice is that people who use services should have a say in how they are run, whether any changes need to be made and what the service is going to look like in the future.

At VoiceAbility, we work with hundreds of people to help them make sure their voices are heard and we do that in lots of different ways. You can read all about our current Active Voice projects in this section:

• Self Advocacy
• Support Planning and Brokerage
• Parliament
• Next Steps
• YPSU
• Family Fusion
• Travel Training
• Access Checkers
• Quality Checkers
• National Citizen Service

What kind of services should have a Participation and Involvement strategy?

All services should have some kind of Participation and Involvement strategy. For any organisation to offer the best service it can, the views of the people who use the service need to be taken into consideration.

How does Participation and Involvement work?

For a lot of big companies, Participation and Involvement is managed by a customer services team. People can complain about things that they don’t like or put forward suggestions about what they want to see more of. The feedback is passed to the decision makers and changes are made accordingly (or not!)

This works well for the people who shout the loudest, but not always for people who can’t or don’t feel able to put their views forward.

Smaller organisations aren’t always able to collect information in this way. They need to speak with the people who use their services directly to get their thoughts. Forums and focus groups are a good way of gathering the views and opinions of others but, once again, those that shout the loudest can often be the only ones heard. The best Participation and Involvement schemes bring opportunities for every person who uses the service to be involved in its future and there are a myriad of ways to do this. With all its Active Voices Projects, VoiceAbility aims to give service users the opportunity to have their say and participate in the continuous development of services.

How to get more involved in decisions about services

You might have a fantastic idea about how to raise your own voice in a crowd, or want to discuss any other ideas you might have to get people involved in your area. Whatever your idea, let us know and we can work with you to try and make it happen!

Email graham.fitzgerald@voiceability.org or call him on 01223 555850.