Participatory projects in the area of poverty and social exclusion aim to give people who live in some of the UK’s more deprived communities an opportunity to have their voices heard. The PSE website will be joining forces with a number of these projects to offer a wider platform for their work and to provide a better understanding of the lives of those living in areas of the UK getting left behind. The projects have been chosen on the basis that they allow the participants themselves to ‘bear witness’ as to their experiences and that they have involved the participants in the choice of issues covered and publicised. If you are involved in a participatory project that you think might be of interest to a wider audience and would like to share some of your work with us, please contact us.

A photo taken by one of the children participating in a project run by Children North East.

During the summer holidays of 2011, children in deprived communities in the north east of England were asked to take photos of things in their lives. Of the 11,000 images taken, only one, a cinema, involved an entrance fee – all the rest, like the park above, were things that were in the children’s immediate locality and free.