January Update: Celebrating what we achieved together in 2024 and looking forward to 2025

Happy New Year. As we embark on the new year, we’d like to use this opportunity to celebrate our achievements in 2024, remind you of all the learning you shared with us in our blogs and look forward to 2025.

Co-Producing ourselves

Updated our payment policy

Thanks to your feedback and support we launched our updated payment policy  which is piloting new payment rates until 31 March 2025. The changes include:

• Increased rates for activities co-producing ourselves
• Introduction of a new rate for co-producers involved with external partners and research projects

You can read more about this in our blog. Please let us know any feedback you have by 31 March 2025.

LinkedIn training

We co-produced our first introduction to LinkedIn training session with three members of our community who were experienced LinkedIn users and three who were new to it. The training session took place in October and was called ‘Unlock the Potential of LinkedIn: A Beginner-Friendly Session’. It was so popular that we are running another one on Tuesday 4 February. This session is now full but if you would like to be on the waiting list, sign up on our Eventbrite page and even if we can’t accommodate you this time, if there is enough demand, we will organise another session in a few months’ time. You can read more about what we learnt from the experience of co-producing this session in our blog.

Anti-racism project

We have had many conversations with people about their experiences of racism in co-production spaces and will releasing a report about this in the next few weeks.

Championing Co-production

Bluesky

As result of what happened on X/Twitter in August 2024 we took the decision to no longer be active on the platform and are using Bluesky instead. Please follow us there on @coprocollective.bsky.social

Measuring Success event

Our ‘Measuring Success in Co-production Learning by Doing Programme’ funded and provided support for eight projects within the themes of mental health, wellbeing and/or climate change in order to learn how best to evaluate co-production. In December we held an online event that celebrated the experiences and outputs of the eight project teams funded in the programme. You can read more about this in our blog. Look out for our project report coming soon.

The programme is supported by Co-Production Collective, Co-producers with a range of lived experience and The Evaluation Exchange (a collaboration between UCL and Compost London) and representatives from two of our co-funders, UCL Grand Challenges and The Academy of Medical Sciences, who supplemented our Research England funding for this programme.

Get Involved

Community Member Journey Project

We are launching a project to help us better understand our community members involvement in the Collective and what we can put in place, aside from payment to better support people. We are hosting an initial session to review what has been done so far in this area and what else we can do. We are looking for 7 people who have been actively involved in the Collective for over a year and 7 who are new to the Collective to join us at a session week commencing 17 February 2025. If you are interested to find out more or would like to take part, please email coproduction@ucl.ac.uk by 9am Monday 3 February.

These are some of the things we are looking forward to in 2025

• The launch of our new website
• The launch of the ‘Measuring Success in Co-Production Learning by Doing’ Report and resources
• The launch of a report about experiences of racism in co-production spaces and recommended next steps. This work has been developed in partnership with People’s Voice Media and people with lived experience.
• Co-producing a co-production training course for UCL
• Co-producing our Community Member Journey Project
• Continuing to support organisations and research partners to embed co-production in their projects and research.

These are some the highlights from our lessons in co-production blogs from 2024

1. A relational journey rather than a project‍
2. How to best engage the public to participate in collaborative projects
   
3. Diving in: Reflections on evaluating ourselves
4. Multicultural Co-production: the Amar Bari, Amar Jibon (My Home, My Life) partnership
5. Co-Production and Commissioning‍
6. Co-designing peer support resources for neurodivergent young people
   
7. Bringing compassion, responsibilities and co-production into story collecting and story telling: perspectives from Peer Working‍
8. The transformative journey through Co-Production from the inside out
   
9. The importance of trust in co-production
10. Co-producing evaluations: Sharing a journey of discovery‍
11. What we experienced at the Not Another Co-Production Festival
    
12. The benefits of co-producing evidence synthesis: Lessons from co-producing the diabetic eye-screening systematic map

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Photo credit: Canva