January Team Update: Announcing successful Measuring Success applicants and looking ahead to 2024

Measuring success update

We launched our Measuring Success in Co-production funding call in September. Building on our previous Value of Co-production research and pilot projects, we want to explore both the impact and evaluation of co-production within the themes of climate change, mental health and wellbeing.

Our first event about this funding call attracted over 200 potential applicants. Community groups, third sector organisations, academics, and people with lived and living experience were all keen to connect with each other and we facilitated this at our networking event in October.

As you might expect, we are co-producing the funding programme ourselves. Our team of five co-producers along with our community and academic partners are all keen to share what we learn from the development of the programme itself, before we support the evaluation and co-production activities of the funded projects which start in January. The programme team brings together people with a diverse range of expertise and lived/living experience, including the UCL Evaluation Exchange and Compost London (who are leading the co-design and co-delivery of deepening practice sessions and mentoring to support for the projects), UCL Grand Challenges and The Academy of Medical Sciences.

We were thrilled to receive more than 50 applications in November. Working at pace, our team reviewed all applications within extremely tight deadlines; it was a great team effort!

23 projects were shortlisted and examined in greater detail, and from these applications, eight have been chosen to be funded. These projects are:

• Co-producing an evaluation of the Aphasia New Music Group
• Exploring the Value of Meta-Co-Production
• Co-Production from the Inside Out
• Improving Student Mental Health: University of Warwick
• Tri-diagnosis: raising the profile of dual diagnosis and homelessness
• Assessing the Impact of Co-Production in Fostering Equality and Diversity in Mental Health and Wellbeing Research
• Exploring how neurodivergence interacts with maintaining eco-hope and taking climate action for those studying and / or working in sustainability-related areas.
• The Symptoms of Diagnostics Labelling - Re-evaluating the language used in mental health”. An evaluation of co-production in action.

The projects are extremely varied. From using creative music sessions to help people recovering from brain injuries, to supporting the mental health of people experiencing homelessness, what the projects all share is a belief that equitable collaboration can allow purposeful research to improve outcomes. One initiative will investigate the challenges neurodivergent people encounter when taking action against climate change whilst another explores how co-production can be used to set strategies for the development of new research institutions.

2024 is shaping up to be an exciting year for us, and we hope you will keep up to date with our programme by checking in with our Measuring Success in Co-production webpage.

Coming up in January

These are some of the things we are looking forward to being involved with in January:

• Developing a video for London School of Medicine and Tropical Medicine Succeed Project MOOC (a Massive Open Online Course)
• Heavy Menstrual Bleeding workshop at end of January
• Safeguarding and Co-Production session with Kings College London
  

And, these are some of the things we are looking forward to being involved with in 2024

• Relaunching our website
• The 5-year London Alliance for the Coproduction of Evidence Synthesis (LACES) project with the Evidence for Policy & Practice Information Centre (EPPI Centre) at UCL
• Our work on becoming an anti-racist community
• Developing action plans for the implementation of ‘Our Direction 2022-2028’

We will share further information about all of these pieces of work, and how you can get involved, soon.

Please get in touch if you have any questions at all. You can reach us via email on coproduction@ucl.ac.uk

We look forward to working with you in 2024 and beyond!

Just in case you missed them these are some the highlights from our lessons in co-production blogs from 2023

• Walking in your footsteps: Exploring co-production involving creative workshops
• Peer Power – It’s What We Do: Lessons about co-production with people who have lived experience of hepatitis C and/or injecting drug use
• ‘Challenges of Equity in Authorship’ co-production workshop initial discussions
• A Vision for an Equitable Future Built on Stories
• All about Ethics
• Thinking about authorship justice - Reflections on the ‘Challenges of Equity in Authorship’ workshop
• Epistemic Injustice and Co-production
• Proving Co-production in the cultural sector works
• Participatory Visions: “It’s not about empowering people, it’s about holding space…”
• Co-production within archival spaces: what I have learnt
• The game changing effects of co-production and patient involvement in raising the profile of oral health