Leeds Voices

Enabling the voices of people in Leeds to be heard

This project is now on hold.

For information about volunteering to support key health messages in the local community, take a look at the Community Champions Project.

The Leeds Voices project works to ensure that local people and communities have their say on changes to services in Leeds.

Our way of working ensures that public organisations conducting consultation or engagement activities can be confident that the voices of underrepresented communities can be reached.

Most of our current work is with the NHS Leeds CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group), although we are available to work with other organisations.

How we work

Leeds Voices works with partner organisations and volunteers from across the City to help reach out to a diverse range of people including underrepresented communities, working people and the general public. To do this effectively we run three strands of work:

Engaging Voices is our network of third sector organisations that support us to feedback the voices of their service users and communities.

Working Voices is our network of employers in the city that support us to feedback the voice of their employees.

Leeds Health Ambassadors are our team of volunteers who help us run engagement activities and connect with people, communities and our partner organisations.

Leeds Voices Projects

Engaging Voices

Engaging Voices is a network of charities and groups we work with across Leeds, running activities with their service users to allow them to share their views on new and existing local health and changes to public services.

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Working Voices

The Leeds Voices project Working Voices seeks to engage the voices of working people on what changes are made to public and health services. By partnering with organisations who run activities such as focus groups or survey programmes with their employees, we ensure that workers views are heard.

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Leeds Health Ambassadors

Leeds Health Ambassadors are volunteers who work with the Leeds Voices team and our Engaging Voices partners to support consultations and engagements to find out what the people of Leeds think of public and health services and ensure that Leeds voices are heard.

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Get in touch with the Leeds Voices team

We’d love to hear from you! If you have any questions or would like to find out more about any of the Leeds Voices projects, you can contact the team on 0113 297 7920 or email leedsvoices@val.org.uk.

Our Engagements and Activity

Since 2018 we have run many engagements with communities across a range of health issues, links to details of these engagements can be found below.

We produce an annual report each year to summarise and capture all the work Leeds Voices has carried out that year with the help of our partners and health ambassadors.

View and download our 2020 Annual Report

View and download our Leeds Voices celebration document

Mobilising Communities Engagements 2021

Two engagements Leeds Voices have been asked to run in 2021 was to instantly mobilise communities responses: these engagements have been:

Community Engagement and Covid Vaccination: to speak to targeted communities about reluctance to have the Covid vaccine and,
Adult inpatient stroke rehabilitation services – a change of venue for stroke rehabilitation patients

Community Engagement and Covid Vaccination

Description of the Engagement

To further understand which communities are experiencing vaccine hesitancy and concerns,

Understand what those concerns are,
Find out what information partners need and in what format to make an informed choice about having the vaccine.
Direct partners to existing information, via the CCG website as well as identify whether different formats of information are required.
Follow up with partners to confirm that information is getting through to communities and whether there are any gaps
To share this information with CCG and comms teams if there are any gaps.

Read the full report here

Adult inpatient stroke rehabilitation services

Description of the Engagement

The aim of the Leeds Voices Involvement work was to: ‘to support the relocation by engaging with communities most likely to be affected by a stroke’

We were asked to seek the opinions of people from South Asian, Black Caribbean, Black African and Eastern European communities and their carers because we know that people from those communities are more likely to suffer from a stroke.

We worked closely with the Stroke Association and used the FAST material to talk to groups about recognising the signs of a stroke. This information will be shared with the Stroke Association and is included here as it gives useful insight into public health material for these communities.

Despite the disproportionate number of people from Black, South Asian and Eastern European background who experience strokes, the Stroke Association users are predominantly white British, we included this question with participants and have recorded their feedback.

Read the full report here