Team update: Anti-racism, co-production and looking ahead

What we’ve been up to

Last month, we’ve continued our journey to embed anti-racism into all areas of our work.

We’ve also been busy preparing resources for the autumn, including an online course for UCL staff and students, and we’ve started doing some work to feed into a research project about tackling racism in maternity care.

Our Co-Pro Cuppa in September sparked brilliant conversations, and we’re looking forward to the next one on Wednesday 1 October at 13:30 (UK time) . Keep reading to find out more about all this work and more plus what’s coming up next!

On 2 July 2025, our Allies Group came together once again to talk about some of the important work we’re doing at Co-Production Collective. We’ve now published the notes from this meeting. You can read the blog about his meeting to find out what was discussed in more detail.

In August we held another session with the group of co-producers who are reviewing our safeguarding statement. We began this work in March, trying to integrate what we have learnt from anti-racism work to become part of all our activities. A further update on this work will be shared soon.

As part of our staff team’s monthly learning sessions, we were joined by researcher and sexual health doctor Julia Bailey, who kindly shared her knowledge on sexual and reproductive healthcare for trans and non-binary people.

In our continuing work looking at how co-production spaces can benefit from anti-racism, we brought together a team of co-producers to set up an anti-racism working group to action some of the recommendations of our Understanding Anti-Racism in Co-Production Spaces: Centring the Voices of Racialised Individuals report. Getting to know each other, we talked about the things that we had all experienced previously that had drawn us to this work. We began thinking about how we might like to work together, and this will help us to agree a way of working that we can take into our next meeting in September.  

Sarah and co-producers Asher, Julie, Sharon, Stuart and Vas have been busy recording videos and voiceovers for our new online e-learning course for UCL staff and students. We’ll be launching this course in the Autumn, so watch this space!

Coming up

We will be continuing to explore funding application plans with co-producers for a proposed research project as part of the Challenge: Maternity Disparities Consortium, a project led and funded by the National Institute for Healthcare Research (NIHR). In two online sessions, we will be coming together to:

• Explore how racism shows up in maternity care - from GP services to hospital wards
• Work together to shape what meaningful and effective anti-racism education and training should look like

Co-Pro Cuppa

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

• How to involve people with lived experience in decisions across all parts of an organisation
• The importance of providing trauma informed wrap around care for people with lived or living experience who are taking part in co-production
• What the term lived experience means in the context of co-production generally and specifically within Co-Pro Cuppa settings

Our next Co-Pro Cuppas will take place on:

• Wednesday 1 October at 13:30 (UK time)
• Thursday 6 November at 13:00 (UK time)

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

Photo credit: Canva