April Team update: Springing into action

As we enjoy the benefits spring has to offer, we are excited to share some new projects with you as well opportunities to get involved.

The Amplifying Voices Programme

We were excited to receive more than 70 applications to our Amplifying Voices programme. We are running this project alongside People’s Voice Media, funded by The National Lottery Fund.  Ten people have been recruited onto the core programme. As there was such demand, we were able to offer an additional 20 people the opportunity to take part in online Community Reporting training. We are now getting ready to begin with an Amplifying Voices residential at the end of April and look forward to sharing more about this with you soon.

What we’ve been up to

Laura, Alice, Nicc and George, alongside Michelle and David from Croydon Council, facilitated the first workshop of our new two-year project funded by the Mayor of London’s Civic Partnership programme. The new project aims to co-produce plans with the community to regenerate the Surrey Street area of Croydon town centre.  The group, which is made up of a mixture of residents and members of Croydon Council, will meet monthly to discuss and develop plans. This builds on the work we did last year that you can read about in this blog.

Nicc, Chloe and Naheen facilitated a workshop which focused on “power and people” for our last cohort of Mental Health Sciences PhD students.

Community members Sarah and Mahabuba took part in a project to co-produce a way of measuring the impacts of public and patient involvement (PPI) for the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Blood Bourne and Sexually Transmitted Infections based at UCL. They joined planning sessions with researchers Shema and Vas, and PPI representatives Al and Tracy, to co-design a workshop that brought together people with an interest in evaluating public and patient involvement. Together, they planned the workshop, decided on icebreaker activities and chose the format of each session.

On the day, Sarah and Mahabuba helped with running the workshop which was attended by people with lived and learnt experience including researchers, clinicians and people who have participated in public and patient involvement activities as a lived experience representative.  They presented an introduction to co-production and led the discussions on their tables to analyse different approaches to evaluating PPI. After the workshop, they led reflection sessions with the planning group to collect information about how the session had run, and how everyone found being part of the project. The project team will be writing up their experiences and what they learned soon, so watch this space!

Coming up

Laura, Alice, Nicc and George, alongside Michelle and David from Croydon Council, will facilitate the second of our workshops to co-produce plans to develop the Surrey Street area of Croydon town centre.

The Co-Production Network for Wales is organising a National Co-Production Conference on Wednesday 21 May. The conference will feature speakers on co-production, panel discussions on national and regional approaches to delivering co-production in Wales, interactive workshops and activities to inspire participants to put theory into practice, as well as opportunities to network and learn together. We have the opportunity to fund the participation of two community members, including travel reimbursement. Participants will be randomly selected. If you would like to attend the conference, please email coproduction@ucl.ac.uk with your interest by Monday 28 April.

New Local is hosting its annual Stronger Things Conference on Tuesday 3 June at the Guildhall in London. This one-day conference celebrates community power and aims to “reimagine the future of public services and unleash the potential in our places.”  We can fund the participation of two community members, including travel reimbursement. Participants will be randomly selected. If you would like to attend the conference, please email coproduction@ucl.ac.uk with your interest by Monday 5 May.

Get involved

Help us to deliver Co-production Training to UCL staff

Helen is looking for two co-producers who would be willing to partner with her to deliver a two-hour long “Introduction to Co-Production" session at 14.00-16.00 on Tuesday 10th June. This session will be held in person in central London. In line with our payment policy, we will pay you for preparing and delivering the session and can also pay local travel (within London). This session is for UCL staff and researchers and is taking place as part of Transform. This is a UCL programme of training being organised by UCL to encourage two-way exchange of ideas, evidence and expertise between universities, organisations and communities outside of academia. Please do email coproduction@ucl.ac.uk by 9am Tuesday 20 May if you are interested and let us know in a few sentences why you would like to be involved. If multiple people are interested, two people will be selected at random.

Co-Pro Cuppas

Thank you for coming to our March Co-Pro Cuppa! It was great to see many of you there. We had great discussions on a variety of topics including bridging the gap between people with lived experience and professionals in a project, setting the tone of a project early to flatten power dynamics and using inclusive communication to ensure accessibility and address challenges like tokenism.

Our next Co-Pro Cuppas will take place on:

• Wednesday 7 May at 13:00 (UK time)

• Wednesday 4 June at 11:00 (UK time)

• Thursday 3 July at 12:00 (UK time)

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

Phot credit: Canva