Answers on a postcard

Last night I saw a facebook post from Hammond House Gallery in Louth advertising a creative project based around creating postcards of Louth to highlight personal views of what makes that place special through an image and a written message on the back. These postcards will be displayed in the Gallery and then mailed to their intended recipient after the exhibition has ended. 

It reminded me of the annual Edward Gorey Envelope Art competition and an open invitation from the Minories gallery in Colchester where they have invited people to submit a collage on a postcard which would then form part of an exhibition. 

This made me reflect a little on two things; our attempt to invite people in Lincolnshire to share their thoughts on what the future of Health and Social Care in the county looks like and creative approaches to ‘voice’ work. And, I suppose a third thing that has been on my mind, and which connects these two things – how do ordinary people influence the many changes we are seeing in local government and in how health services are organised and delivered?  

Our call for people to contribute to Where do we go from here? elicited a few responses, not as many as we hoped and we are still happy for people to send us their thoughts in whatever form works for them. Some of the responses we got were more creative than others, some extremely reflective. They can be found, unedited, on the LVET website. I suppose what I hadn’t thought through was what happens after we get people’s contributions, other than giving them an airing online.  

Over the week I have been chatting with colleagues about how we can get a better understanding of the health, social care and wellbeing activity going on in communities around Lincolnshire and how we feed that into the many conversations that are taking place. 

Not only were we talking how we hear the voices of people, organisations and professionals but also about how we make that available for people to access so they can use that insight to influence and inform policy decisions and service redesign? We’ve been talking about how we make it easy for people to share thoughts on what matters to them.  

I have also been chatting with the people who put on the Remedy Photo festival about what went well and, if we help them to do it again next year,what we could do differently and what else we could do throughout the year (by the way if you went to any of the exhibitions they would love to hear your feedback). Part of these conversations was about the possibility of a series of workshops throughout the year and supporting people to tell their stories through photography. This use of photography also came up in conversations with the @Its All About People team as it is one of the many tools that can be used in the Community Reporting process.  

It made me wonder… if you could send a postcard about what matters most to you right now, in relation to health, social care or wellbeing, what would that postcard say? What image would you use to sum up your feelings? And who would you send it to?