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.

Back in May, the EUARENAS project held its first Community of Practice (CoP) in-person session as part of a project meeting in Reggio Emilia. The CoP is made-up of folk from research, services, policy and communities across Europe and the group is interested in learning and developing their knowledge about how democracy works in local communities, and how citizens (in the broadest sense of the term – i.e., people who live in a place) and communities can be more involved in local democracy. As part of this session, we delivered an introductory activity that looked at the future of democracy in Europe – this blog shares with you some of the ideas from this session…

Democracy Now

When reflecting on what democracy feels like where they live and work, the CoP members noted points such as:

• Citizens feel removed from the political process – they perhaps don’t care or feel powerless to affect change 
• There was a sense that ‘European identity’ is being diminished 
• Growing complexity administration and bureaucracy causing blockages and disconnect 
• Truth and trust doesn’t feel valued 

A key question being posed, was is democracy really working? Are current structures really supporting the practice or principles of social equality – or are they unwittingly helping maintain inequalities? 

The future we’d like to see

Given that some of the points above point to a ‘crisis in democracy’, CoP members had some interesting ideas about how this could look very different. These ideas included:

• Citizens having more agency and involvement in democracy – moving to ‘deep democracy’, going beyond just voting and being involved in deliberation and decision-making 
• Having a ‘value-driven’ democracy 
• Local government with the competencies to support new ways of working with citizens and involving them in local democracy

Ideas for getting there

So, given that the CoP members would like to changes from the current situation, we spent some time thinking about how we might get there. Thinking and suggestions in this area were:

• Mainstreaming of existing practices such as participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, crowdsourced law – so that these become the new ‘status quo’
• Adopting test and learn approaches as a way that experimentation can be done and actively learned from
• Find ways of celebrating and connecting up the small changes that are taking place – this will help people see that progress is being made, even when it feels like things are changing too slow

The full results of this workshop will be combined with more detailed work done with residents of different cities across Europe to produce an insight briefing focusing on how people across Europe are currently experiencing democracy and their ideas for the future.

This will be released in Autumn 2022 – watch this space!

This week, members of the PVM team have been in Palermo, along with partners from the CONTINUE Project, to deliver training on Knowledge Exchange activities and share updates on work package progress. A representative from Gorse Hill Studios – our local partner based in Stretford, Greater Manchester – also joined us, for a week of shared learning and development.

We kicked off the week by exchanging key learnings from stakeholder interviews which partners had conducted with people in their local communities. The interviews were with a range of different people including teachers, youth workers and representatives from local government and explore their thoughts on how the COVID-19 Pandemic has impacted the lives of young people. Each partner presented the key learnings from each of the interviews, then we moved on to discussing how we could share this information with other people working in the field.

As part of the training, the group exchanged ideas for activities that could be used in the knowledge exchange event to facilitate discussion – ideas ranged from the Fishbowl technique to Focus Groups, creating safe spaces and World Café. We were then provided with a template session plan which each of us will adjust to suit the needs of the groups we’ll be working with.

Partners are now fully equipped to organise and deliver their knowledge exchange events. This stage of the project will be wrapped up by the end of September. Each partner will then write up a set of local policy briefings (using the learnings from the KE events) which will be shared in the hopes of influencing change.

A further Pan-European Knowledge Exchange event is set to take place by late November, combining the learnings from the local sessions and building further understandings – this will feed into a final Pan-European Policy briefing which is set to be released in the New Year.

The TNP took place the day after the training sessions and enabled partners to update on the progress of the project and discuss future plans.

Stay up to date with project happenings on the PVM blog and be sure to follow us on social media for more frequent updates. 

As part of England’s Co-Production Week 2022, we teamed up with Ideas Alliance, the partners on the Not Another Co-Production project and co-producers from across the country to deliver our first ‘Not Another Co-Production Festival‘. This little blog will give you a glimpse of some of the day’s shenanigans.

So, what happened then?

Well, as someone, somewhere once said “if you build it, they’ll come”… and that certainly came true at the Science and Industry Museum earlier this week. Lead by the fab crew at Ideas Alliance the vision for a ‘learning festival’ that felt different to conventional events and was most of all, fun – came to life. Around 200 people came through the doors to take part in silent discos, interactive performances, listening spaces, workshops, talks, chat shows, games, public living rooms and much more. The aim of the day was to bring people together to have conversations about co-production, make connections and explore the challenges within this space. On the day, topics explored included faux production (you know the kind – when weak versions of consultations are packaged as ‘coproduction’ because it’s the ‘in thing’ to do), why are co-production spaces so white? (and what can we do to change this), how to be more human (have a gander at the Camerados principles for a helping hand in this) and much more.

Sounds great – what’s next?

Well, first the team needs to regroup a little and do something thinking over what worked in the space we created and what didn’t – or what cold be better next time. Then we will be starting the next year of the project in the West Midlands. Over the Summer, we’ll be looking at what this looks like and releasing some more details by late Summer/early Autumn about how you can get involved. We will be in touch with more info soon!