Understanding Anti-Racism in Co-Production Spaces Report - 9 months on

Last February, we launched our report on anti-racism in co-production, titled ‘Understanding Anti-Racism in Co-Production Spaces: Centring the Voices of Racialised Individuals’. The project came from concerns raised about the negative experiences of racialised people in co-production settings, and the racism in these spaces that mirrors that of wider society. We gathered and curated 37 stories to collect key learnings and produce some actionable recommendations.

These are the recommendations of the report:

• Centre the voices of racialised individuals
• Create spaces for open dialogue about race
• Commit to anti-racism as an ongoing process
• Empower Global Majority leadership

These recommendations are easy to say but difficult to achieve. So, since the report was launched in February, we’ve been busy behind the scenes, making plans to help them become a reality.

What have we been up to?‍

We set up a Global Majority-led Anti-Racism Working Group which is made up of a small group of racialised people and white allies who are co-producers, staff members, and academics at UCL. We had our first meeting in October, where we reflected on the findings of the report and discussed priorities.

From this initial meeting the Collective has developed three main areas of work that we plan to focus on:

1. Strategic overview: formalising an Anti-Racism Strategy (our ambitions for the next few years), reworking the Collective’s Core Values and Ways of Working, and co-producing an evaluation strategy for our anti racism work.
2. Safety and information hygiene resource: creating a resource that gives guidance on how to promote change in co-production spaces in a way that prioritises personal safety.
3. Educational resources and training: developing and providing anti-racism training and education packages for researchers, organisations, colleagues, and teams.

As part of the strategic overview, we’ve produced a Community Commitments document, a set of guidelines for session facilitators and attendees that centre anti-racist principles. We’ve started using these in our sessions and will continue collecting feedback on them and reflecting with you all on how we’re working towards making our spaces truly anti-racist.

Anti-racism in co-production workshops

We’ve also been busy delivering an ‘anti-racism in co-production’ workshops in a variety of settings.

We can now offer this as a paid for workshop to organisations, or teams/departments, with tailored sessions to suit different contexts. If you are interested in finding out more or booking a session with us, please contact coproduction@ucl.ac.uk. This training isn’t currently suited to individuals, but we are working on a paid for course for individuals to be launched soon.

Join a Solidarity space

On Monday 8 December at 12 noon (UK time) Co-Production Collective and People’s Voice Media are running an online solidarity space for people of the Global Majority to come together and discuss topics that are difficult to bring up in daily life.

If you are part of the Global Majority and are interested in attending, please email Hania at coproduction@ucl.ac.uk. Subject to demand, we plan to run more spaces like this in future on a monthly basis.

How you can find out more about our anti-racism work

The work is far from over, and we’ve committed to the process of making our spaces anti-racist. Over the next few months we will share regular updates of our progress and let you know about ways you can get involved so please sign up to be a member of our community or sign up to our newsletter by emailing coproduction@ucl.ac.uk to find out more.

If you are involved in similar work and would benefit from a discussion, please reach out, we would love to hear from you.

Image credit: Illustration by Kareen Cox of Absolutely Kareen