From Caring About to Caring For – What Spotlight on Care Shows About Participatory Media

Spotlight on Cares Evaluation 001 2026 06 15 (Small)

The first edition of Spotlight on Care on Soar Sound is not simply a programme about unpaid carers. It is a practical demonstration of what community media can do when it starts with lived experience, listens properly, and gives people enough room to describe the responsibilities that shape their everyday lives.

Recorded to coincide with Leicester City Council’s Carers Conference on 10 June 2026, the programme brings together extended testimony from people across Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland whose lives have been shaped by caring. Some have cared for parents, partners, children, relatives and friends. Some are carers while also managing disabilities, mental health challenges, or health conditions of their own. Some only came to recognise themselves as carers after many years of doing what they understood simply as family duty.

This matters because there is an old and useful distinction to be made about the media we live with. Much of our media tells us what we should care about. It selects issues, raises alarms, sorts people into categories, and asks us to have opinions. Far less of our media helps us to care for the things that matter to us: our relationships, our neighbourhoods, our responsibilities, our shared institutions, and the people whose lives are bound up with our own.

Spotlight on Care belongs in that second tradition. It does not treat caring as a policy topic only, or as a private burden hidden behind closed doors. It treats caring as a shared civic experience. The programme makes visible the practical, emotional and moral work that holds families and communities together, while also showing how easily that work can become isolating when systems fail to recognise it.

Evaluation

One of the strongest themes across the episode is recognition. Several contributors describe not initially seeing themselves as carers. They were wives, husbands, daughters, granddaughters, parents, neighbours or friends. They were arranging appointments, translating needs, managing medication, organising transport, advocating in hospital settings, dealing with paperwork, and providing emotional support. Yet because this work was wrapped inside family and cultural expectations, it often went unnamed.

This naming matters. Not because people need another label imposed on them, but because the label can unlock recognition, rights, support and solidarity. The episode shows that becoming visible as a carer is often a social process. People find the word through a conversation at a coffee morning, a carers’ group, a trusted worker, a friend, or another person who has been through something similar. This is where participatory media has a distinctive role. It allows people to hear themselves in the experience of others without being reduced to a case study.

The extended podcast format is especially important. Short clips can raise awareness, but extended testimony allows listeners to understand complexity. Mary describes the double difficulty of caring for her father while using a wheelchair herself, and how health and care systems often lacked a practical way to recognise that the carer also had support needs. Other contributors speak about caring within Asian and Indian family contexts, where duty, marriage and family responsibility can make it harder to ask for help, even when support is available. Lala’s account shows how caring, mental health, identity and recovery can become deeply entangled. Raj’s testimony gives a long view of caring across a lifetime, from being a young carer in education to becoming a multiple carer, parent, advocate and peer supporter. Georgia reflects on becoming a carer as a younger adult, while also trying to sustain work, family life and independence.

Taken together, these accounts resist a narrow or segregated understanding of need. Identity matters in the programme, but it is not treated as a separate enclosure. Age, disability, culture, language, mental health, family structure, employment and poverty all shape the experience of caring. But the programme does not turn these differences into separate echo chambers of identity-based need. Instead, it places them in relation to one another. The result is a richer account of shared responsibility: people have different starting points, but many encounter the same practical questions of recognition, access, emotional support, respite, trust and continuity.

This is where the programme becomes more than storytelling. It becomes developmental. The testimonies help listeners understand how personal experience becomes community knowledge, and how community knowledge can inform civic action. The discussion of the co-produced emergency support plan is a clear example. Ross from Leicester City Council explains that the plan has been developed with carers and professionals so that, if a carer is suddenly unable to provide support, key information about the person being cared for is available and usable. This is not abstract consultation. It is an example of lived experience shaping a practical tool that can reduce uncertainty and improve continuity of care.

The episode offers a useful model of media engagement. Participatory media is sometimes misunderstood as simply giving people a microphone. This programme shows that the value is deeper than that. A participatory approach creates a setting in which people can connect their own experience with wider social structures. It allows testimony to become evidence, recognition to become mutual support, and listening to become a form of civic learning.

The programme also challenges media producers, public services and community organisations to think differently about impact. The impact of a programme like this is not only measured in downloads or reach. It is measured in whether someone hears the programme and realises they are a carer. It is measured in whether they register with their GP, contact a carers’ service, ask for a carers’ assessment, apply for a Carers Passport, or join a peer group. It is measured in whether a professional hears the testimony and changes how they ask about family support, appointment times, transport, language access or the wellbeing of the carer.

There is also a deeper democratic value here. When people speak at length about the realities of care, they help the wider community understand what is usually hidden. They remind us that civic life is not only made through formal meetings, strategies and services. It is made through everyday acts of support, repeated over years, often without pay, status or reliable recognition. The question is whether our media can make those acts visible in ways that strengthen relationships rather than exploit emotion.

Spotlight on Care suggests that it can. By combining broadcast, podcast, testimony and public information, Soar Sound has created something that is both personal and civic. It helps listeners care about unpaid carers, certainly. More importantly, it helps listeners understand how we might better care for carers, for one another, and for the local systems that need to become more humane, responsive and connected.

That is the real value of the programme. It does not simply report on care as an issue. It models care as a practice: listening carefully, holding complexity, recognising difference, connecting people to support, and allowing shared experience to become a basis for practical responsibility. For those of us committed to independent, civic and community-focused media, this is the work that matters. Media should not only direct attention. It should help communities develop the capacity to notice, understand and care for the things that sustain them.