March Team Update: Reflecting and growing together

Welcome to our March Team Update! We’ve been working hard to champion co-production and live our values of embracing change and being reflective. We delivered our second co-produced LinkedIn introduction session and held the first co-creation meeting for our Community Member Journey project to seek out news ideas on how we can learn and improve the ways we work together with our community.

What we’ve been up to

We held our second co-produced LinkedIn training session, which brought together people with different levels of experience to learn how to use LinkedIn more effectively. We covered the basics like setting up a profile, making connections, posting interesting content, and championing co-production on LinkedIn. The interactive format allowed everyone to ask questions and discuss interesting topics like managing different roles as professionals and people with lived experience. If you would be interested to take part in a LinkedIn training session in the future, please let us know by emailing coproduction@ucl.ac.uk. Pease follow us on our LinkedIn page if you haven’t already!

We had the first co-creation meeting for our Community Member Journey project with eight co-producers to help us better understand our members’ involvement in the Collective and what we can out in place to better support people. Some of the recommendations from the session included:

• Providing clearer information about time commitment for specific projects
• Asking people to fill out a feedback form after each Co-Pro Cuppa so that if people experience anything they are uncomfortable with, they can let us know in an anonymous way.
• Sharing more information about organisations we work with to help co-producers prepare for organisational differences

At the next meeting, we will look at what else we can do support new and long-term members on their journey with the Collective and come up with a few ideas that can be co-produced with those involved. Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to the session!

Nicc, Rosie, Lee and Tania delivered a series of sessions for a group of PhD students from UCL’s Global Business School for Health. The teaching focused on what co-production is, and why it matters.

We held the first workshop as part of a project to co-produce new online training about co-production for UCL staff and students. Sarah was joined by community members Asher, Julie, Stuart and Sonia and UCL staff members Esme, Jhono and Sharon to kick off the project. We discussed what we thought the most important parts of co-production were, and what we’d like trainees to be able to take away from the course. We’ll be meeting again next month to get started on the content and planning out what the training session will look like.

In February, Vanessa attended a training session by the National Survival User Network on monitoring, evaluation, and learning. The training was designed to help grassroots groups, particularly those led by people with lived experience of mental health challenges, understand how to measure their impact. The session focused on explaining monitoring, evaluation and learning concepts, provided practical tools for evaluating their work and learn how to show funders the difference their group is making.

Coming up

The Co-Production Network for Wales is organising a National Co-Production Conference on Wednesday 21 May. The conference will feature speakers on co-production, panel discussions on national and regional approaches to delivering co-production in Wales, interactive workshops and activities to inspire participants to out theory in practice, as well as opportunities to network and learn together. We have the opportunity to fund the participation of two community members, including travel reimbursement. Participants will be randomly selected. If you would like to attend the conference, please email coproduction@ucl.ac.uk with your interest by Friday 9 May.

The Race Equality Network are hosting the Northern Race Equality Conference on Wednesday 9 April between 10 am – 4:30 pm at Bradford University. The conference has been coordinated in partnership with the Ella Baker School of Organising and Inclusive North, with the aim of bringing together a range of partners, stakeholders, activists, advocates, organisations, lawyers, researchers, and academics committed to building a more inclusive and anti-racist society.

The conference will aim to cover topics such as policing and the criminal justice system, inequalities facing asylum seekers and refugees, influencing policy, building solidarity through grass roots organisations, the role of advocacy and campaigning, health inequalities and much more. The conference will create a collective opportunity for everyone to learn and become more effective champions of racial justice, inclusion and equal rights.

For full details of the conference and to book your tickets, look at their webpage.

Get involved

In addition to us currently recruiting a Co-Production Partnerships Manager to our staff team. These are our current opportunities to get involved. If you looking for opportunites to get involved don't forget to keep checking our  Current Opportunities as this does get updated on a regular basis as new opportunities arise.

Your feedback needed to revised payment policy

In September 2024 we announced changes to our payment policy that would be piloted for 6 months. We would now love your feedback about the new rates and payment methods. Please fill out this survey by Monday 14 April to share your feedback.

Join the Contraception Project

We are supporting the Contraception Project, which is a part of the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Reproductive Health, to work in a co-produced way. To support this project, we are looking for four people with lived experience in relation to reproductive health and contraception to join our team and co-produce the project. You will work alongside Reproductive Health Policy Research Unit team members and other lived experience team members across the full duration of the project, as well as our Stakeholder Group (a selection of lived and learnt experience members advising on the project). We hope to recruit:

• Two members who have or have had experience of using (or deciding not to use) contraception primarily to prevent pregnancy
• Two members who have or have had experience using (or not deciding not to use) contraception or hormonal treatment to manage gynaecological symptoms, such as heavy menstrual bleeding.

This project is running from February 2025 to September 2026, so ideally individuals will have the desire and capacity to contribute over this period. Time commitment will vary over the course of the project, from 1-2 hours some months to 8-10 others.

To find out more information about the project, you can read our blog.

You can express your interest by completing our online expression of interest form by 12 noon (UK time) on Monday 31 March 2025 letting us know. If you have any questions email 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 great discussions on a variety of topics including the challenges in achieving parity between paid staff and volunteers, and the importance of investing time to build trusting relationships between researchers and people with lived experience. We also heard suggestions about how co-production training might focus on issues of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and how these themes might best be integrated into co-production. There was also a discussion about evaluation methods and our Measuring Success in Co-production programme has also been exploring this - please watch our website for further information about this coming soon!

Our next Co-Pro Cuppas will take place on:

• Tuesday 1 April at 13:30 (UK time)
• Wednesday 7 May at 13:00 (UK time)
• Wednesday 4 June at 11:00 (UK time)

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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