August Team update: looking back, moving fowards

This month we’ve been busy with training, sharing our work and reflecting on the progress of our strategy - “Creating Change Together: Our Direction 2023 – 2028". We’ve also said a fond farewell to Aleem, who’s been part of the Co-Production Collective staff team since 2023.

What we've been up to

Hania and Aleem attended the monthly project meeting for the suicide prevention project partnership with co-producers and partners at the National Suicide Prevention Alliance, where they began planning for Year 2 of the project.

Sarah and co-producers involved in the COMMET (Co-producing Mathematical Models of Epidemics Together) project attended two conferences to share our work so far. The first conference, Living Knowledge shared our experiences with an international audience of people interested in participatory research, citizen science and public engagement. At the second conference, The European Conference of Mathematical and Theoretical Biology, we introduced co-production to the attendees and contributed to a session exploring how co-production can improve modelling of infectious diseases.

Asma and Niccola – along with our collaborators Simon and Tom – completed a thorough review of our strategy, ‘Our Direction 2023-2028’. As part of this review, they collected, summarised, and shared feedback on our current values and ambitions from our community, partners, research funders, Allies Group members, and Co-Production Collective staff.  

Asma attended a meeting with the Green Horizons team to discuss and distribute our accessibility budget, ensuring that our offerings prioritise access, communication, and safety needs of programme participants. They are simultaneously developing a Green Horizons access statement and co-producer payment policy, both of which will be used to guide ongoing and future work.  

Rosie and co-producers delivered Co-Production training to SPROCKET research team and three lived experience panels. Together they explored what co-production means within the context of support for children and young people with complex health needs, and those who support them.  

Rosie, the IMPACT team at Birmingham University, and co-producers delivered a taster session of the Anti-Racism in Co-Production Spaces training that they have been developing. Together, they discussed how racism often shows up in co-production spaces and the need to continue pushing for change. Feedback from the session will be used to further develop future sessions.  

Goodbye to Aleem

At the end of July, we said goodbye to Aleem who’s been a member of the Co-Production Collective team since May 2023. Aleem first worked on our Measuring Success in Co-Production Project and has supported a wide variety of co-production projects since then alongside providing technical expertise in our Co-Pro Cuppas and acting as the first point of contact for queries to our Co-Production Collective inbox. We wish him every success for the future!

Coming up

Hania, Isaac, and partners at Race Equality Foundation and National Voices are hosting the first two of a series of co-design workshops, as part of the NHS Race & Health Observatory funded project to create a practical digital resource that supports health and care organisations to embed anti-racist community participation and co-production throughout their work and services.  

Sarah and the rest of the COMMET (Co-producing Mathematical Models of Epidemics Together) team will be holding the second set of workshops with communities affected by mpox in the UK. We’ll be exploring assumptions that are made in mathematical models of epidemics and sharing our progress since we last met.

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Photo by Khachik Simonian on Unsplash