Designed to engage service users in the Good Shepard Centre, which provides services for those at risk of homelessness, Finding Our Voice was a creative programme with empowerment and the creative amplification of marginalised voices at its core.

Finding Our Voice was run with the objective of supporting service users through creative expression and poetry to develop safe terms in which to express their thoughts and feelings on their own life experiences, while developing creative pathways to promote service user involvement in the programme.

A twelve-week programme of workshops was run with a showcase planned that was to feature service users reading their work, however, due to the COVID19 pandemic this showcase was cancelled. Instead, a video series featuring local frontline staff reading participants work was shot and distributed online, demonstrating the connection of the Good Shepard Centre, and its users, to the community at large. To date the video series has received upwards of seven thousand views online.

Opening up channels between service users and providers, as well as platforming undervalued perspectives and experience, the programme proved so successful it has been rolled out into centres around the country and is now the model for a national programme of workshops, all facilitated by Colm.