Aspiring to be equitable – March team update

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day that happened on Wednesday 8 March was ‘embracing equity’. According to the Cambridge Dictionary equity is ‘the situation in which everyone is treated fairly according to their needs and no group of people is given special treatment.' This is something that we as Co-Production Collective strive to embody in living our values of being human, transparent, inclusive and challenging.

If you have any thoughts on about us being a more equitable organisation, please let us know by emailing coproduction@ucl.ac.uk or get in touch if you would like to be involved in our our 'being an anti-racist community work which we will be picking up again in an official way the near future.

What we have been up to recently ‍

Below is a selection of what we have been up to and what else is coming up soon. Please let us know by emailing coproduction@ucl.ac.uk if you would like to be involved in any way.

• We are the co-production partner on a piece of research being conducted by The Open University in partnership with the Bangla Housing Association (BHA) based in Hackney and the Housing LIN, a national learning & improvement network, which aims to understand the living environment needs of Bangladeshi elders across four London Boroughs. The project is called Amar bari amar jibon [my home, my life] research project. Yesmin and George spent the day at the Bangla Housing Association providing an introduction to co-production and reflection to their Bangla Research Advisory Group along with The Open University and Bangla Housing Association team. The Bangla Research Advisory Group is made up of men and women recruited from within the four borough communities to comment and advise on an ongoing basis on the progress of the research, assist with analysis, and advise on the use of the findings of the research.
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• We hosted our final ‘Journey of Change’ workshop. Thanks to those of you who were able to join us for this. These discussions will inform our upcoming strategy session on March 22. This session is now full but there will be other opportunities to get involved and we will be sharing information in a blog soon, we will keep you posted.
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• Niccola and Lynn were invited to speak about impact and involvement at a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) ‘Necessary Conversations’ event.
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• We hosted the last of our NHS England events for people working in hearing and ear care for children and young people with supportive needs that we mentioned to you in our February update.
  
  
• We trained a group of staff from London Borough of Barnet Council on what co-production is and how to go about working in this way.
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• We conducted our second workshop for Macmillan Cancer Support and Green Lane Masjid in Birmingham.
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• We had our latest Allies Group meeting on 13 March (our advisory group that acts as our advisors and sounding board, bringing their different experiences and expertise to guide our development). We will share the notes soon. Feel free to have a read of the notes from the last meeting in December.
  

Co-Pro Cuppas

In this month’s Co-Pro Cuppa (our informal monthly chance to connect with friends, meet new people who are interested in co-production to share ideas and learn from each other) we talked about in-person versus online appointments within healthcare settings and what patients want as well as all sorts of other things related to co-production that people had on their minds.

Our next two cuppa’s are on Monday 3 April at 13.00 and Thursday 4 May at 11.00. You can sign up to join us via our events page on the website.

Coming up soon

We will be showcasing our Value of Co-Production Research Project at the Social Sciences Impact Conference in Oxford on 21 March, let us know if you live nearby and would like to join us. coproduction@ucl.ac.uk

We will be hosting the first our sessions to co-create our new strategy the successor to ‘Our Direction’ on Wednesday 22 March. This session is now full but there will be more opportunities in the future to get involved.

Get involved in our new project about evaluation

We've received £150,000 of funding from Research England’s participatory research funding allocation for 2022-2023 to build on the Value of Co-Production Research project and look how to develop a way to measure what success looks like in co-production. See our blog on this to find out more.

Join us at Social Work Week

On Friday 24 March 2.30pm to 3.30pm Niccola and Isaac will be talking about ‘What is the value of co-production? Exploring the value of co-production through stories.’ Find out more and book on the Social Work England website.

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