February Team Update: Sharing our love for co-production

It may still be cold and gloomy outside, but we’ve been bringing people together to try and encourage more love and appreciation for co-production.

What we got up to in January

Training LUSTRUM2 – Co-production in action workshop

Tu, Rosie and Nicc facilitated a session for UCL & Glasgow Caledonian University about co-production in action, exploring definitions, models, principles of co-production, and working in a values-led way. The LUSTRUM2 project is working on co-producing a set of short films to encourage partners to test for sexual transmitted diseases (STIs).

Co-production within Commissioning workshop

Chloe, Stuart and Nicc, provided an introduction to co-production within commissioning, for commissioners and providers in the Sunderland area. Together with lead organisation Collaborate CIC, the group explored the challenges and opportunities of working together in a co-produced way in commissioning, how power may manifest within this setting, as well as the benefits of applying co-production as a way of working.

UCL Global Business School for Health: Masters module in health innovation and assessment – Co-production and Engagement session

Yesmin, Vita, Sarah and Nicc delivered an introductory training session about co-production and public engagement to the UCL Global Business School Masters students sharing the benefits of using this value-based approach as well as how to go about it.

Consultancy work

Co-producing Croydon

Alice, George, Nicc and Laura facilitated the first two of four ‘Co-producing Croydon’ workshops with Croydon Council’s Placemaking team as part of its Urban Room initiative. Funded by University College London's Research England’s Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) the workshops brought together people live, work and study in Croydon, to begin a collaborative way of working and imagining the future of Croydon town centre, helping break down barriers.

Championing Co-Production

Measuring Success in Co-production: working with different projects to deepen their practice.

In the final week of January, we were thrilled to get together with the eight funded project teams that are taking part in the ‘Measuring Success in Co-production: Learning by doing’ programme. This was the first of four deepening practice sessions that will happen between now and June. This first session gave us the opportunity to meet the teams, learn more about their work and begin the process of supporting their evaluation and co-production activities. The session was led by our colleagues at the Evaluation Exchange and began by outlining the different approaches to evaluation that can be used. We are now busy co-producing the second of these sessions for later this month, which will introduce some of the different evaluation methods that teams might adopt for their own contexts. You can learn more about the programme and the individual projects on the Measuring Success webpage.

Coming up in February

• The third ‘Co-Producing Croydon’ workshop
• The first of three workshops where we help Royal Free Charity to embed co-production in the way that they work as an organisation
• A Safeguarding and co-production session for Kings College London
• Our next Measuring Success event, the second Deepening Practice session
• A Co-Production Collective Allies Group meeting

Get involved

A chance to share feedback on our draft 2023 Impact Report

We are working on developing our Impact Report 2023 to showcase our achievements and summarise our year in numbers. We are looking for five people to read and comment on the draft document between Friday 1 March and–Friday 8 March before we launch it on our website at the end of the month. This should take you about 2 hours, if you would like to be paid for your time we are able to offer payment of £50 for this. If you would like to be involved please let us know by emailing coproduction@ucl.ac.uk by noon on Friday 23 February.

We are looking for people to provide testimonials for the Collective website

We are currently working on redeveloping our website so that we can better communicate what we do. Thank you to all those of you have been involved so far. We are currently looking to gather testimonials from our community. If you have a testimonial to share with us we would love to hear from you. Testimonials could be about things like:

• What being part of Co-Production Collective means to you
• What you have learnt from/ how you have benefitted being part of Co-Production Collective
• What co-production means to you
• What you get out of attending our Co-Pro Cuppas
• What difference Co-Production Collective has made your organisation/project

If you are happy to contribute a testimonial, please get in touch by emailing us on coproduction@ucl.ac.uk

Co-Pro Cuppas

Thank you for coming to our February Co-Pro Cuppa. It was really lovely to see so many new faces and talk about different contexts for co-production and learn from each other.

Our next Co-Pro Cuppas will take place on:

• Tuesday 5 March at 13.00
• Monday 8 April at 11:30

You can find out more about the Cuppas and sign up via the events page on our website or on our Eventbrite.

If you have any questions or would like to know more about our work, please get in contact by emailing us on coproduction@ucl.ac.uk.

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Picture credit to @freestock from Unsplash.