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!

We’ve been working on how to present our social impact and learnings for a few years now. Our first big attempt for the year 2019/20 felt all wrong and too numbers-based for an organisation that works with lived experience storytelling. Last year’s report was a lot better after we piloted using reflective storytelling as our main impact-measurement tool and we felt it better reflected People’s Voice Media and the work we do.

This year, for the 2021/22 report, we have built on this even further after realising that it wasn’t really a social impact report at all, but more an annual report of our learnings as an organisation. We still look at impact through reflective storytelling, but we use this as a tool to identify learnings and work out how to put these into action.

Today we are releasing our Annual Learning Report 2021/22 into the world, but we have already begun pulling out learnings and creating a plan of action in order to put them into practice. This is something we are reviewing every quarter and, as such, we hope to make this a working document that’s useful to not only People’s Voice Media, but also our partners and others who work with lived experience storytelling.

So, without further ado, here is our Annual Learning Report… Let us know what you think!

For those who prefer to listen to an audio summary of the report, you can do so here:

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.

People’s Voice Media and the Community Reporter Network have teamed up with the Co-Production Collective as part of a UKRI funded project to gather people’s experiences of co-production. We will then be using these stories and working with the storytellers (people with lived experience of co-production) to identify what changes co-production can bring to services, research, and policy.

So, what is co-production? 

The Co-Production Collective define it as:

an approach to working together in equal partnership and for equal benefit. For us, this means living our core values. These values – challenging, human, inclusive, transparent – are central to everything we do.

Why are we doing this?

We want to have a deeper understanding of the value of co-production and use this insight from people’s everyday experiences of co-production to support the implementation and use of co-production as a means of change in the areas of services, research, and policy. We also want to acquire a deeper knowledge and understanding of co-production from a wide range of individuals and community perspectives so that we can us it in our own work.

How have we gathered the stories?

We started our research with an open call for contributors, including people with lived experience, professionals, researchers, policymakers to sharing individual stories or group stories of co-production. To gather the stories, we’ve used our Community Reporting method… more on that here:

We matched those that were interested in sharing their stories of co-production with three members of our team who all have first-hand experience of co-producing in a variety of settings. People groups that expressed an interest in sharing their stories were invited to a 30-minute conversation about co-production over Zoom… with a few conversations also being held in-person.

 What questions did we ask?

Our ‘conversation starters’ were:

• Can you share with me an experience of co-production?
• We are interested in exploring what worked well and what didn’t.
• We’d also like to know what changes the co-production process helped to create and what impact you feel the impact – positive or negative – that the co-production process has had on people, groups, organisations, services, society etc?

From here, the conversations went in their own unique directions!

How will we use the stories?

Once we have gathered all the stories, we will use them to create:

• An online story archive hosted on the Institute of Community Reporters website – bringing people’s stories together so they can be watched and shared online.
• A findings report that summarises the key learning from all the different stories.
• A YouTube playlist containing short, edited extracts from each of the stories, with subtitles.

We’ve also been running some participatory workshops with different people to help us create these outputs and findings. They should be ready for October 2022 and released publicly! 

And, the story won’t end here. We will continue to explore what we have learned and use this to affect change in different places. As a community and project, we are keen to use these insights to not only further our own knowledge and skill around co-production, but are hopeful that these insights show that co-production is something that can make a difference not only to individual lives but to research, services, and policy.

The CONTINUE Project is continuing apace and the partners across Europe have recently completed a series of interviews with stakeholders, both local and pan-European.

The stakeholder groups were made up of decision-makers and policy-makers whose roles include and interest in or effect on young people e.g. local politicians, educators, health and social care workers, youth workers etc. The interviews were designed to get feedback from stakeholders on the project’s findings so far, as well as garner their insights on what they perceive to be the issues affecting young people in the wake of the pandemic.

Interestingly, and gratifyingly, the insights of the stakeholders largely align with the project’s recent findings. You can read the local synthesis reports here, and the pan-European synthesis report here. Both reports are in note form as they are being used to plan our series of knowledge exchange events across Europe.

The UK’s knowledge exchange will take place at Gorse Hill Studios on Wednesday 21st September 2022 at 4.30pm. Anyone can attend, from young people to stakeholders and members of the community. You’ll discuss the findings of the project so far and your discussions will inform the policy recommendations that we will be putting forward in the next stage of the project. You can register for the event here.

You may also wish to save the date for our pan-European knowledge exchange, which will be held online on Monday 14th November 2022. Time and registration link to follow.