March Team Update: Projects coming into bloom this spring

It’s the start of Spring. The flowers are beginning to bloom and we're excited to share the latest developments in our work.

What we got up to in February

Lynn and Vanessa presented and participated in a conversation about research ethics processes and co-production  with the Converge Evaluation and Research Team at York St John University. They presented some of the findings from the Ethics project we worked in partnership with the UCL Engagement team on, along with other evidence. This included dialogue from research with children and young people around the need for more reflective, relational and rights based approaches. This focussed on valuing relationships in ethical processes as well as including experiences of navigating ethics from a co-production and public involvement perspective.

We met with all the eight of the funded teams in the Measuring Success in Co-production programme at our second Deepening Practice session which was led by our colleagues at The UCL Evaluation Exchange and aimed to support the way in which projects collected their information, helping them to refine their evaluation plans. Our next Deepening Practice session is on 25 April and will also include a Sharing and Learning component, supporting co-production activities.

We had an Allies Group meeting in February, where we shared our progress on some of our projects, including the ‘Measuring Success in Co-production Learning by Doing programme’ and our work as part of the Reproductive Health Policy Research Unit which you can read more about in our blog. We also discussed implementing some possible updates to our payment policy and how to ensure the Collective’s long-term sustainability. We will share the Allies Group meeting notes shortly as we usually do.

As we shared previously, we are doing some work to explore how we can be a more effective anti-racism co-production community. As part of this work, People’s Voice Media recently ran several workshops for us with the people who have shared their stories about racism and co-production. The session focussed on reviewing the themes emerging from the stories collected so far. Watching back these stories as a group prompted as you might expect, some difficult conversations. We know how needed these conversations are and as such are continuing to collect stories (please email us on coproduction@ucl.ac.uk if you would like to be involved) and plan to run more of these sessions which will help inform what action we will take in this area. If you have been affected by this update or anything related to our Co-Production Collective work, please feel free to contact Niccola Hutchinson-Pascal (our lead of safeguarding) via email on n.pascal@ucl.ac.uk.

Coming up in March

• The fourth and final of our ‘Co-producing Croydon’ workshops that we mentioned in February Update, we look forward to sharing more about this in the future.
• The third and final workshop to help embed co-production in the way that Royal Free Charity work as an organisation.
• We are supporting homelessness charity Z2K with some workshops about the Disability benefits system.
• The second co-production workshop is coming up for the fourth Mental Health Sciences PhD students at UCL
• We will publish our second Impact Report, reflecting on all the work we did as a community in 2023

Get involved

Join the Policy Research Unit’s Advisory Board

The Reproductive Health Policy Research Unit based at UCL is seeking two enthusiastic individuals to co-chair their Advisory Group. The Unit’s purpose is to produce high quality research to inform reproductive health policy in England. If you’re passionate about reproductive health and the co-production of research, we would love to hear from you. Find out more about this opportunity and how you can apply in this blog.

We are looking for people to provide testimonials for the Collective website

We are currently working on redeveloping our website so that we can better communicate what we do. Thank you to all those of you have been involved so far. We are currently looking to gather testimonials from our community. If you have a testimonial to share with us, we would love to hear from you. Testimonials could be about things like:

• What being part of Co-Production Collective means to you
• What you have learnt from/ how you have benefitted being part of Co-Production Collective
• What co-production means to you
• What you get out of attending our Co-Pro Cuppas
• What difference Co-Production Collective has made your organisation/project

If you are happy to contribute a testimonial, please get in touch by emailing us on coproduction@ucl.ac.uk.

Co-Pro Cuppas

Thank you for coming to our March Co-Pro Cuppa! It was great to see many of you there and discuss some of the practicalities of doing co-production, the different ways you can reward people and the importance of setting realistic expectations.

Our next Co-Pro Cuppas will take place on:

• Monday 8 April at 11:30 (UK time).
• Thursday 2 May at 13:00 (UK time).

You can find out more about the Cuppas and sign up via the events page.

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.

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Photo credit to Aaron Burden from Unsplash.