Revisiting our core values

Thanks to those of you who were able to join us on 27 July 2023 for 'Co-creating our new strategy - Session 3: Our values', the third of our sessions to work together on developing our new direction of travel or strategy for the next 3-5 years of Co-Production Collective - you can read about the the other sessions in our previous blog. This will be the successor to ‘Our Direction’ which was designed for the first two years of our operation. Outlined below is a summary of the discussions from the session and information on how you can get involved.

At the Co-production Collective, we are always trying our best to live and breathe our core values, and they are central to everything we do. Our present values are: Human, Inclusive, Transparent and Challenging. As our values underpin and inform our work, we felt that, as part of our new strategy development, it was important to have some discussions to see if they are still relevant and best describe our community going forward.

What did we talk about in the first breakout session?

In the first breakout session we discussed what values we believe underpin co-production, and how these values make us feel. We looked at an example list of values to help spark inspiration, and then we dived into chatting about our different understandings of co-production, and the values that underpin it. Below you can see a word cloud we created from everyone’s responses, demonstrating the values that came up in our discussions. The words that appear larger are words that more people shared.

What did we talk about in the second breakout session?

In the second breakout session we talked about what the current Co-Production Collective values mean to us, and what we feel might be missing or need changing. Our current values can be seen in the below images. The first image is from our current strategy 'Our Direction' and shows how the values relate to our approach to co-production. The second image (in pink) is a summary of our values and how we use them in our day to day work.

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In addition, we talked about the values that might be missing which included a variety of things from compassion to equity and social justice, bravery and lots of others which you can read about in our in our full notes document. Based on our discussions the general feeling was that our core values are working well, but we need to make some changes to them to make sure they are clear and understandable for everyone and possibly add one or two more. We discussed broadening the understanding of the core value words (e.g. Transparent) and expanding on their description underneath.

You can find a summary of the the whole conversation we had about each of the values in our full notes document – available as a Word document and as a PDF document.

Where to next?

What we have tried to outline below is a possible route forwards in terms of our values. This is by no means complete and really needs your input to refine the wording and also let us know which values you think you should stay, and which should go!

Please follow the steps outlined below to share your thoughts and feelings and we will also check in on this during our final strategy co-production session at 14:00 (UK time) on Monday 18 September (please book a place via Eventbrite if you would like to attend) and when we share a draft of the new strategy with you in early October.

Our proposed new values:

Be compassionate (previously: human)

• Build mutually beneficial relationships based on empathy, respect, honesty, and trust
• Support each other with kindness, and be non-judgemental to others

Be transparent

• Be open and honest about what you are doing and what you are able to give or not to a relationship or project
• Be open about your position of power and address power imbalances and hierarchies

Be proactively inclusive or Be equitable and support social justice (previously: inclusive)

• Remove barriers to participation for all and enable everyone to be their authentic selves
• Recognise people’s strengths and support their development
• Show everyone respect and value diversity of knowledge, experience and perspective

Be reflexive (previously: challenging)

• Reflect on what you learnt, and continue learn from it to improve
• Be reflexive of your own position and practices and be prepared to question your own assumptions
• Challenge the status quo, embracing new ideas and ways of working

Be flexible (possible new value)

• Appreciate diversity and difference in term of opinions and how people get involved in conversations or projects
• Listen openly to other people’s point of view, even if you don’t agree

Be ambitious or Be Brave (possible new value)

• Don’t be afraid take risks to achieve your goals
• Do things that are worth failing at, and keep learning from mistakes‍

How can you get involved?

If you’d like to give your input to our proposed new values but weren’t able to make the meeting on 27 July, you can email us the answers to the following questions, or answer them via this Word document feedback from and email it back to us.

Our questions are:

• What do you think of the proposed values? Are there any changes would you like to make?
• Which of the proposed values would you to see in our new strategy?
• Is there anything we missed that you would like to see amongst our values?

Please send us your responses by 17:00 (UK time) Wednesday 13 September to coproduction@ucl.ac.uk.

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 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.

We are planning a final session on our strategy development at 14:00 (UK time) on Monday 18 September 2023 which we hope you will join us at – to sign up please book on via our Eventbrite page.

Payment

If you weren’t part of the session on 27 July 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.

Further information

If you have any questions, feel free to contact the Co-Production Collective team by emailing us on coproduction@ucl.ac.uk

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