Co-creating ‘Our Direction’ 2.0, our new strategy

Thanks to those of you who were able to join us on 22 March 2023 for the first of our sessions to work together on developing our new direction of travel or strategy for the Co-Production Collective. The successor to ‘Our Direction’ which was designed for the first two years of our operation.

Our aim is to have the new ‘Our Direction’ complete and published by October 2023 so that we have a guide for our work as the Collective over the next few years. The time period for this new strategy (i.e. how long it will be in place for) will be determined by all of us as part of this process.

At our first session were reminded ourselves of our ambitions from ‘Our Direction 2020-2022’ and gave an overview of what we had achieved in that time period. Please feel free to view the slides that were shared at the meeting if you would like to.

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What did we talk about in breakout one?

In the first of our two breakout sessions we discussed in groups whether the ambitions from 2020-2022 were still relevant. From the discussions it was felt that broadly speaking they were still relevant. However, the actions underneath them needed to be developed and updated to reflect what Co-Production Collective does now and what it may hope to achieve in the future.

The following images were created by Tom Readford of Co-Create who helped facilitate the session and show the key themes that came out of the discussions in breakout 1 from summarising all the comments provided and paraphrasing what was said:

What did we talk about in breakout two?

In the second breakout session we discussed what was missing from these ambitions that should be added to the new ‘Our Direction’ or strategy. Some of the themes that came out of this discussion were:

• Sustaining and strengthening our community
• Harnessing technology
• Generous leadership, capacity building and celebrating co-production across the sector
• Measuring impact and learning of the Collective
• Accessibility and inclusion commitments
• Future and legacy planning/sustainability
• Local vs national/ online vs face-to-face‍

We’d love your views on this discussion

If you’d like to give your input to these questions but weren’t able to make the meeting on 22 March then you can either email us the answer to the following questions or answer them on this Word document and send them back to us on coproduction@ucl.ac.uk.

• Are the ambitions from 2020-2022 still relevant?
• Where shall we go next?
• What might be missing from the ambitions?
• Is there any further feedback you have on what came out of the discussions during the first meeting?

Payment

If you weren’t part of the session on 22 March and are joining us in a personal capacity, then we are able to offer a payment of £25 to cover an hour of your time to respond to these questions.

 Please send us your responses by 9am (UK time) Monday 8 May to coproduction@ucl.ac.uk

What’s next

We will build on this discussion at our next strategy development session on Tuesday 23 May at 13.00 (UK time). Find out more and book.

We aim to share the outcomes from the 2^nd session in early June for you to feed back your thoughts.