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Photo of a yellow diamond shaped sign with a wiggly arrow pointing upwards on it - Photo credit Mark Konig from Unsplash

Co-creating ‘Our Direction’ 2.0, our new strategy

April 24, 2023

Thanks to those of you who were able to join us on 22 March 2023 for the first of our sessions to work together on developing our new direction of travel or strategy for the Co-Production Collective. The successor to ‘Our Direction’ which was designed for the first two years of our operation.

Our aim is to have the new ‘Our Direction’ complete and published by October 2023 so that we have a guide for our work as the Collective over the next few years. The time period for this new strategy (i.e. how long it will be in place for) will be determined by all of us as part of this process.

At our first session were reminded ourselves of our ambitions from ‘Our Direction 2020-2022’ and gave an overview of what we had achieved in that time period. Please feel free to view the slides that were shared at the meeting if you would like to.

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What did we talk about in breakout one?

In the first of our two breakout sessions we discussed in groups whether the ambitions from 2020-2022 were still relevant. From the discussions it was felt that broadly speaking they were still relevant. However, the actions underneath them needed to be developed and updated to reflect what Co-Production Collective does now and what it may hope to achieve in the future.

The following images were created by Tom Readford of Co-Create who helped facilitate the session and show the key themes that came out of the discussions in breakout 1 from summarising all the comments provided and paraphrasing what was said:

4 grey boxes one for each ambition in the Co-Production Collectives strategy with speech bubbles on the first grey box says Leading culture change - the speech bubbles say Change is constant so still relevant / Work on shifting culture / People still need to know what Co-Pro is /We need to be proactive /Its more about the politics of change than culture change /Should be beyond health research/Culture change takes time - we need to keep at it / Some of these are incomplete as yet / e need to be able to evaluate the difference we have made - Next box sys Planning for the future and bubbles say 'its relevant/Ambitions are still relevant but need tweaking/Increase active income but also ensure grant funding/ Funding needs to be ethical/ We need to aim high, not stand still/ Recognise that funding helps with influence/focus on sustainability/scale up what we are good at - between the boxes it says 'Evidencing impact and funding are linked' the next box is Learning and developing How to get lay-people involved?/We should never stop evaluating - it's an ongoing process/Spectrum of Co-pro needs establishing /Training members to deliver training and increase their involvement is important/ Find out where our L&D isn't reaching /L&D and evaluation are vital - the final box says 'Growing our communty' the speech bubbles say We need a wider diversity of people involved /Target more people in an organisation - one person can easily move on/Form collaborations/Opportunity to use creative methods to develop these ideas further/Think creatively about how to grow our audience/Target a wider audience
Summary of comments per ambition from Breakout 1
Image of 10 post it notes saying 'The essence of the discussion was that the ambitions are still relevant, but the content needs updating to reflect CPC today/Many comments relate to tightening up' either a definition, a target audience or a focus/Multiple references were made to the importance of embedding evaluation / Many suggested the need to consider who we should work with, and how / There was appetite to aim high and set goals to get us there / Many people discussed the importance of keeping to our values and principles / On funding: A wide range of opinions, from targeting a sector to broadening out ..and from focusing on consultancy to maintaining grant - funding but the consistent message was financial sustainability is key
Overall summary of feedback from breakout 1


What did we talk about in breakout two?

In the second breakout session we discussed what was missing from these ambitions that should be added to the new ‘Our Direction’ or strategy. Some of the themes that came out of this discussion were:

  • Sustaining and strengthening our community
  • Harnessing technology
  • Generous leadership, capacity building and celebrating co-production across the sector
  • Measuring impact and learning of the Collective
  • Accessibility and inclusion commitments
  • Future and legacy planning/sustainability
  • Local vs national/ online vs face-to-face‍


We’d love your views on this discussion

If you’d like to give your input to these questions but weren’t able to make the meeting on 22 March then you can either email us the answer to the following questions or answer them on this Word document and send them back to us on coproduction@ucl.ac.uk.

  • Are the ambitions from 2020-2022 still relevant?
  • Where shall we go next?
  • What might be missing from the ambitions?
  • Is there any further feedback you have on what came out of the discussions during the first meeting?


Payment

If you weren’t part of the session on 22 March and are joining us in a personal capacity, then we are able to offer a payment of £25 to cover an hour of your time to respond to these questions.

 Please send us your responses by 9am (UK time) Monday 8 May to coproduction@ucl.ac.uk

What’s next

We will build on this discussion at our next strategy development session on Tuesday 23 May at 13.00 (UK time). Find out more and book.

We aim to share the outcomes from the 2nd session in early June for you to feed back your thoughts.

 

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