January 25, 2022
University College London (UCL) is consulting on a brand-new five-year strategic plan and we want to share your thoughts and feedback about the potential role of communities, co-production and collaboration.
One of our four ambitions for 2020-2022, as laid out in our co-created strategy, is to ‘Lead Culture Change’ to influence individuals, organisations and systems to put co-production at the heart of everything they do. This UCL consultation is a brilliant opportunity for Co-Production Collective to do just that – read on to find out how you can get involved.
Co-Production Collective is based at UCL, a large university which carries out research and teaching right across sciences, medicine, the arts and social sciences (a multi-disciplinary university). The Collective’s links to UCL help us understand how research currently works, and what we think needs to change. Our close ties also encourage UCL researchers to get involved as members of our co-production community and, increasingly, to work with the Collective when they apply for funding for their research.
Beginning in October 2021 and finishing at the end of April 2022, UCL senior management are publishing a series of consultation papers on its whole-university priorities for the next five years, and is asking people inside and outside UCL for their views. Given our base at UCL, we think it is important that Co-Production Collective network members have the chance to add their voices to the conversation on the university’s future direction. Three papers have come out so far and there are more to come!
We’re not expecting you to plough your way through all of them (though if you want to you can find them on the UCL website) but what we have done is to try to summarise, in non-academic language, the elements which relate most closely to UCL’s ambitions for partnership working with communities locally, across the UK and globally. This is in relation to helping solve what UCL refers to as “Grand Challenges” - some of the biggest challenges facing the world and affecting communities at local, national and global scale:
You can read our summary paper highlighting the areas of the consultation relevant to Co-Production Collective, available here as a PDF and as an accessible Word document.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas so we can feed them back to UCL by the next consultation deadline in early February. As you might expect at this early stage, there are quite a lot of words in the papers which set out UCL’s aspirations around partnership working but fewer details about the practicalities of making this a reality. The three questions below might spark ideas but you are, of course, welcome to share your thoughts more broadly too.
There are a few different ways you can get involved but they all start with reading this summary document - available as a PDF or as an accessible Word document.
Once you've had a chance to read through this, please could you share your responses to the questions above, and any additional thoughts of your own via this online form.
If you would prefer, you’re welcome to email us your response instead – coproduction@ucl.ac.uk - and you’re always welcome to give us a ring too. If you email us, please could you let us know if you would like your comments shared anonymously.
The initial deadline has been extended, so you have until Sunday 13 February to submit your responses.
Payment
It’s totally up to you how long you choose to spend on this work – whether you send some brief thoughts or a longer response. If you do spend an hour or two on this, and are responding in a personal capacity, we would like to offer payment of £50 for your time and contribution.
If you’re submitting via the form, please provide your details in response to the question about payment. If you’re submitting via email, please add a line stating the same thing, and we’ll get in touch to organise this for you ASAP.
If you have any questions about this or any other aspects of the UCL strategic priorities consultation, please get in touch: coproduction@ucl.ac.uk
Once we have received all the responses on 1 February, we’ll be collating them into one document which will be submitted to UCL. We’ll update the blog with this document once it's ready, and share more information when we can.
This is also only one of the various areas UCL will be consulting on as senior leaders develop the strategic plan. We would like to continue including you in the conversation, and will be exploring other ways we can do this too.
There’s a lot of information here and a very short timeline, so we really appreciate you taking the time and energy to contribute. This is a real opportunity for the Co-Production Collective community to have an influence on UCL’s priorities and help us move closer towards achieving our vision – a world where diverse knowledge and experience is recognised and valued in the co-production of research - and beyond.
Interested in finding out more or exploring how we could work together?
Co-Produce with us