October Team update: Celebrating 5 years of Co-Production Collective

On 22 October, Co-Production Collective marks five years of co-producing, learning and growing with our amazing community. Whether you’ve been here from the beginning or have just recently joined us, we’re so grateful for the energy, care and ideas you bring.

As we celebrate the milestone, we’d especially love to hear your reflections on the first five years of Co-Production Collective. You can find out how to get involved at the end of this blog.

Here’s to the next five years – and beyond!

What we’ve been up to

Hania and Aleem attended a meeting of the Advisory Group for the London Alliance for the Co-production of Evidence Synthesis (LACES) project. Evidence synthesis involves bringing together different research studies on a specific topic. Although the Advisory Group does not directly co-produce the research, members play a key role in guiding and overseeing the direction and quality of the research to ensure that the methods used, reflect the values and principles of co-production.

Hania and Aleem met with a team of co-producers to continue Co-Production Collective’s anti-racism work. The group are planning to develop a learning module which will give practical guidance to support co-production practices to be actively anti-discriminatory. This builds on the recommendations of the Understanding Anti-Racism in Co-Production Spaces report.

Nicc, Hania and Aleem had a meeting with our partners at the National Suicide Prevention Alliance as part of a new project to help shape how people with personal experience of suicide are involved in suicide prevention work across London. Thanks to those of you who applied to be part of this project. - We had over 40 applications for one role and hope to be able to include more people in the future. We will keep you updated as the project progresses.

Nicc and Isaac facilitated a workshop for Disability Rights UK’s Co-production Group as part of our work supporting them to embed co-production within all levels of the organisation.  

Laura, Alice and Nicc alongside Michelle, David and Molly from Croydon Council facilitated the fifth and sixth workshops in a two-year project to regenerate the Surrey Street area of Croydon town centre.

Nicc, Chloe and Naheen facilitated a workshop which focused on safeguarding and co-production for the current cohort of the UCL-Wellcome Mental Health Sciences PhD students.

Nicc attended the #SocialCareFutures Gathering in Manchester to run a session with Isaac, Debora and Jacqui which focussed on the findings from ‘Understanding Anti-racism in Co-production spaces‘ and how to make co-production more inclusive and actively anti-racist.

Coming up

Nicc, Stuart and Vita will be running a session about co-production, focussing particularly on sharing power and decision making, for the Commissioning in Communities programme which supports commissioners to develop their practice.

We will be soon launching our launching solidarity spaces for racialised individuals and other marginalised groups. These will be dedicated sessions where people can share their experiences in a way that feels safe and supportive. If you are interested in finding out more, please sign up to be a member of our community and we will keep you informed.

Get involved

Help shape our first themed Co-Pro Cuppa in December

In our 2024 Community Survey and Co-Pro Cuppa survey, you told us that you were really keen on the idea that some of the Co-Pro Cuppas we offer during the year be themed around a specific topic. From ideas put forward in those surveys we recently asked people who had signed up to be members of our community to vote on what they wanted our first ever themed Co-Pro Cuppa to be about. The winning topic was “How do we get others to understand what co-production really means?”.  We are excited to announce that this special themed Cuppa will take place on 2 December and are now looking for 2 people to get involved to help shape this Cuppa - You can find out more details on our Current opportunities page.

Help us celebrate our 5th birthday by sharing your reflections on our first 5 years

As it’s our 5th birthday this month, we are looking for people to share reflections about the first 5 years of Co-Production Collective including:

• What being part of Co-Production Collective means to you
• How you have benefited from being part of Co-Production Collective
• Reflections on how the co-production movement has grown and developed over the past 5 years.

Please email coproduction@ucl.ac.uk with anything you’d like to share. We are keen to feature videos as well as written content, and can support you to create this.

Co Pro Cuppas

Thanks to those of you who came to our October Co-Pro Cuppa! It was great to see many of you there. We had a wide ranging discussion on a variety of topics including:

• The definition of co-production in the context of words like co-design
• The challenges of facilitating co-production conversations equitably and some examples of what can help with this
• The challenges of running co-production projects for organisations that are new to co-production

Our next co pro cuppa is on 6 November and we would love to see you there.

Image credit: Canva Pro