In the Building Community Connections project, a group of support organisations wanted to develop collaborative and community-led solutions to health inequalities in Calderdale. We worked with different communities to train local people as Community Reporters who were tasked with gathering lived experience stories about health issues, experiences of the pandemic and wellbeing topics from their peer networks.

The learning from these stories has informed the commissioning of local initiatives and interventions. This way of commissioning (in a more co-productive way) was quite new for the area and was an experiment for the partners involved.

We’ve worked with the project and its partners and stakeholders to capture the learning from this process. This short video summarises the key findings from this learning journey and experimental approach to commissioning and addressing health inequalities at a local level. Take a look!

We are thrilled to announce that the findings of the ‘What is the value of co-production?’ project are now live.

You can:

• Watch a video summary of the findings from our Community Reporting (7 mins)
• Read the overview report (10 pages, 15 mins)
• Read the full report (80 pages, a couple of hours but so worth it!)
• Watch the YouTube playlist of fantastic extracts from all of the storytellers

None of these amazing resources would have been possible without all of the people who shared their stories with us. We are so grateful for their time and the insights that have shaped this important bit of research.

And there’s more…

There were also some other strands to this research that you might be interested in. All the details are on this webpage: What is the value of co-production?

This includes:

• An overview video of whole project
• Interactive summary PDF of whole project
  • A screen reader friendly version – as a Word document and as a PDF document.
  • An audio version – as a MP4 file
  • Versions of the Interactive summary in Braille, EPUB, MOBI – via a Google Drive folder
• As well as the Community Reporting findings, this also includes the results of the Gobby survey, a rapid critical review and learning from pilot projects.

We hope that this resources and research findings are useful to you – and please do share widely.

And look out for more coming soon – there will be the launch of a resource library for co-production and much more besides! Watch this space!

Over the course of this year, our team have been working with municipalities across Europe connected to the EUARENAS project to engage citizens in talking about their experiences of democracy in the present day and exploring their visions for the future. And we are made-up to be sharing an insight briefing based on these activities with you!

This briefing provides an overview of the key learning from a series of storytelling and future thinking workshops that took place in Gdańsk, Poland, Vōru, Estonia and Reggio Emilia, Italy. The insights are based on 33 citizen stories from these areas.

It highlights key challenges in present day European democracies such as the lack of engagement of specific demographics including young people and migrant communities, and how the potential of technology to democratise decision-making and support citizen participation is not fully being realised. Future visions of democracy include bringing voices on the margins into the mainstream, and creating more human connections between people in positions of power and the communities they serve. To achieve this, education, collaboration and pro-active approaches to achieving equity are needed.  Click the button below to access the briefing.

After a successful first year in Greater Manchester where we supported people, communities and organisations to develop their co-production practice, the Not Another Co-Production project is back. This year we will be working across the West Midlands with our colleagues at Ideas Alliance to embed co-production into how services and institutions work – bringing the voices of local people closer to decision-makers.

The programme for year 2 was launched in The Crescent Theatre, Birmingham earlier this month, with around 30 or so people joining us to find out more about what the project has to offer. The day saw the project’s team deliver a set of taster activities, including:

• Exploring feelings about positive and negative experiences of services
• What we’d do if we want to actively SABOTAGE co-production
• Listening to lived experience stories of co-production and exploring what we can learn from them

One of the attendees, Sophie, shared her visual notes on the day with us – have a look below.

Speaking about the day, she said: “It was great to be able to talk to people from all sorts of organisations, some similar to mine and some entirely different. The diversity of voices and opinions really gave the event a sense of energy, I felt a lot of potential in the room.”

We are looking forward to rolling with the rest of the programme which will include the delivery of Community Reporting training and some bespoke sessions on working with lived experience stories as part of co-production processes. More on those in the coming months!

Early this year we shared with you, the start of our journey to become actively anti-racist. If you want a little reminder of this, take a look at this blog post. Since then we’ve been continuing both our learning and action, and so we thought we’d do another little update.

So, what have we been learning, exploring or reflecting on?

A colleague at Disability Rights UK shared with us the Home Truths: Undoing racism and delivering real diversity in the charity sector report. As the report states:

The charity sector has a problem with racial and ethnic diversity. Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic (BAME) people are under-represented in the sector and those who are in charities can be subject to racism and antagonism not faced by white colleagues.

It contains a set of recommendations aimed at the sector, funders, individual charities and leaders within charities that can help in addressing systemic racism within the charity arena. As a team, we’ve looked through the recommendations and identified what we are already doing to contribute to the recommendations for change and what actions we could be taking. We are now using this to help us develop an anti-racism strategy or theory of change (or sorts) that will help us identify outcomes around diversity, equity and inclusion and the route to achieving them. We are hoping to be able to share this with you in Autumn. 

Some of the ideas for the future include, (1) using our social media more actively to engage in or start conversations about anti-racism, (2) developing a complaints procedure specifically for incidents of racism and ensuring it encompasses not just the ‘team’ but is something that people who access our events and workshops can utilised if needed to and (3) look at and utilise what training or mentoring from specialists in this area is available. 

What’s already changed or is changing…

So, since our last blog we’ve changed the way we do things and started to put things into practice. These include:

• Testing out different ways of recruiting that are more about finding folk who align themselves to our values and mission, rather than who – as the Home Truth’s report states – “can hit the ground running”. 
• Creating a shared bookshelf (in a digital format) of things to read, watch or listen to that could educate us and inform our thinking around racism. We’ve also purchased some books and webinars on this, and are sharing them around layers of our team. 
• Seeking funding to support our work in this arena – in particular, in addressing the whiteness of co-production and research spaces. We haven’t yet been successful in this – but fingers crossed for the future. 
• Acknowledging the whiteness of the spaces we are involved in and projects we work on with partners and actively supporting people from Black and racially minoritized communities access such spaces and be involved in setting the agenda of the conversation. 
• Providing financial support from our current funding and earned income to increase the diversity of people who can access and participate in our events and trainings – such as the annual Community Reporter Conference. 
• Paying attention to the details of our ‘events’ such as choice of music and food, so that they speak to different cultures.  

As ever, we welcome critical reflections and challenge to our actions. Also, if you’d like to suggest any reading material, podcasts and other things, let us know! Equally, if you’re doing work in this area and want to share what’s working for you, then feel free to send a message and start a conversation.