Why we set up Raised Voices

Figure out what you want to do or other people will decide for you - this is the last piece of advice my executive coach gave me before I left the company where I had worked for more than two decades. I didn’t realise what great advice that was until it had percolated in my brain for a while. After two years, his words have led me to this - setting up Raised Voices CIC to empower people to tell their own stories.

As a professional journalist, I have had the privilege of telling people’s stories for more than 20 years. I’ve always seen it as just that - a privilege. They tell me some of the most important and personal things of their lives and trust me to reproduce them in a way that stays true to their own perception of what happened, which I’m also balancing with journalistic integrity. But in recent years the definition of the word ‘privilege’ we mainly talk about could be described as ‘unfair advantage’. And I had that too, although I didn’t realise it when I started out as a 20-something woman working in what was still a macho newsroom environment. I had a platform and access that are the privilege of the very few.

One of the few pictures of me working as a journalist, standing on a literal platform - the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Antony Gormley's One & Other art work in 2009, which I wrote about as the Liverpool Daily Post's arts editor

What I’ve realised over time is that just because I have a platform doesn’t mean it’s always my place to tell other people’s stories. In fact, sometimes the very fact that I have a platform makes me the wrong person to do it. Often people want to speak for themselves, to share their own lived experience without an intermediary. Often they don’t know how to go about this.

That’s why we set up Raised Voices - to use our skills and experience to help people speak up for themselves. We do it in two main ways:

1. Helping communities, not-for profits and individuals promote their work through comms support, strategy and training. That could be by helping you to create a strategy to build your newsletter mailing list, putting together a press pack or training you to understand analytics and how to apply them. We have a particular focus on artists, creatives and independent news publishers because they are the industries we know best - but if you’re outside that space and are looking for help, let’s have a chat.

   
   

2. Projects that provide a platform for you to share your experiences. These include oral history projects and community journalism programmes.

   
   

If this sounds interesting, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch and we can have a catch up about your needs and how we can help.