By Paige Sims, Communications Advisor, Eastlight Community Homes Limited

There’s a temptation when we tell stories about residents, which is to make them about the thing we want to say.

A person has experienced homelessness, so we tell a story about the difference a secure home can make. Someone needed an accessible home, so we tell a story about independent living. Someone has been through a difficult period, so we tell a story about the support we provided. Essentially, we tell the story we need to tell.

That was one of the things we found ourselves thinking about when we created Eastlight Stories, a series of five films and podcast conversations with residents about their lives, their homes and what comes next.

The original idea was to create something that captured a little of the social history of Eastlight residents’ lives – where people had come from, the circumstances that had shaped their experiences and what having a secure home had made possible.

What became increasingly interesting to us wasn’t simply what stories we could tell, but how we should tell them.

There isn’t one route into social housing, there isn’t one type of resident, and there certainly isn’t such a thing as a simple resident story.

Bobbie experienced homelessness. Her story is about the relief and security of having somewhere to put down roots, but it’s also about the extraordinary care she shows towards other living beings, despite having gone through a period when she had experienced very little care herself.

Richard and Rosemarie have built a life together in their home, with Richard caring for Rosemarie as she lives with Alzheimer’s. Their story is full of love and humour. They also made a conscious decision not to buy the social home they previously lived in because they wanted it to remain available to someone who needed social housing.

Govin and Rama met and married in India before moving to the UK and raising their family in Essex. Their purpose-built bungalow has made a real difference to their lives together, giving Rama greater independence. They are also active residents, contributing to their community and helping to influence Eastlight.

Jo never expected to live in social housing. Then life happened, she and her family became homeless, and the direction of her life changed. Now she talks about rebuilding, finding community and having a say in the services that affect her.

Rue fled domestic violence. Her home has given her and her daughter somewhere safe to live, but her story isn’t about being ‘rescued’. It’s about what becomes possible when you have safety: building a career, making plans and creating a life of your own.

These are very different stories, which was exactly the point.

From a communications perspective, there’s always a temptation to make a story work for us. We have a limited amount of space, an audience to engage and usually a message we want people to take away. So, we select the details that support that message, find the strongest quote and build a narrative around it.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Communications is about making choices. But when the subject of the story is a person, those choices come with a responsibility. We can very easily take a complicated life and turn it into a much simpler story.

That was something we wanted to avoid with Eastlight Stories. We wanted residents to share their own experiences in their own words: the events that shaped their lives and the things that matter to them.

That’s also why we chose to use two formats. The short films give us a visual introduction to each resident and their world – their home, family and community. The longer podcast conversations give us the time to hear more of the story in their own words. We didn’t want to reduce someone’s experience to a three-minute film or a few carefully selected quotes.

There’s a difference between giving someone a platform and giving them ownership. We can put a resident’s photograph on a webpage and quote them in a report, while still telling the story we wanted to tell in the first place.

Talking about residents isn’t the same as residents talking about themselves.

All this matters because lived experience gives us a different way of understanding social housing. We can talk about waiting lists, supply, affordability and allocations. We can look at statistics and policy. But none of it tells us what it feels like to experience homelessness, to care for someone with Alzheimer’s, to leave an abusive relationship, or to discover what independence looks like when you finally have a home that works for you.

One person’s experience can’t represent everyone, and lived experience doesn’t replace research, data or professional expertise. But it can challenge the assumptions we make and change the questions we ask.

For me, that’s the communications lesson in Eastlight Stories. When we say we want to tell authentic resident stories, we need to think about whether we’re really interested in the person’s story – or whether we’re looking for a person to illustrate ours.

The stories in Eastlight Stories aren’t really about what Eastlight has done. They’re about people: the things they have lived through, the parts of their lives they hold dear, their hopes for the future and what having a secure home has made possible.

Our job, as communicators, is to listen carefully enough to let those stories be theirs.