How we helped The King’s Fund tell the stories of Healthy Communities Together
We believe that storytelling is a powerful way to communicate the impact and value of social change initiatives. That’s why we were thrilled to work with The King’s Fund and The National Lottery Community Fund (TNLCF) on their Healthy Communities Together programme, which supports genuine partnership-working in local areas between the voluntary and community sector, the NHS and local authorities to improve the health and wellbeing of local communities.
Our role was to document the stories of the different partnerships involved in the programme, in their own words, not about finished projects, but about the progress they were making. We wanted to capture the challenges, the successes, the learnings, and the aspirations of each partnership, and how they were working together to make a difference in their communities.
We didn’t just show up with a camera and a list of questions. We did our homework. We listened to each partnership, carefully understanding the work they were doing. We collaborated with The King’s Fund to turn our research into story outlines, which were then approved by the partnerships. We spent a day with each partnership filming interviews and activities on location, making sure we asked the right questions and followed up with relevant probes. We edited the footage into five six-minute films, which featured on The King’s Fund and each partners website.
We are proud of the films we produced, but more importantly, we are proud of the feedback we received from the partnerships. They appreciated our approach, our values, and our ability to tell their stories in a way that reflected their reality and their vision. Here is what one partnership said about our work:
"I worked with Curtis on a five minute film for a health sector audience about local people in a community wanting to work differently with health services. At the heart of that work was one man’s first-hand experience of trying to stay well.
It was clear from the outset and from what Curtis shared about his other activity eg his podcast that here was someone coming from a values base close to our own, someone who wanted to tell the stories that needed to be told and to do so in a way that centres the real life challenges facing people and communities.
He would not have made and we didn’t want him to make a PR film. Curtis wanted to connect with us and the work to unearth the right questions and the right images for our story. We liked that."
If you are interested in working with us to tell your stories of social change, please get in touch. We would love to hear from you and learn more about your work. We are not just videographers, we are storytellers interested in creating change. And we are ready to help you share your stories with the world.
