September 23, 2024
This month, we are practicing our values of embracing change and being inclusive by co-creating a LinkedIn introduction session for our community members and continuing to address racism within and beyond our organisation. As we transition into autumn, we are sharing our latest updates and invite you to help shape our community survey and Co-Pro Cuppas with us.
As you may have seen in last month’s update we have been working with members of our community who have no experience of using LinkedIn as well as seasoned LinkedIn users to create an introductory session to the platform. We hope this will help our community members to develop their understanding of LinkedIn to help stay updated with the Collective, contribute to conversations about co-production and other areas that interest them, as well as other benefits LinkedIn has to offer. Since our decision to no longer be active on X/Twitter, and instead develop our presence on other social media platforms, the training is even more relevant and important. The LinkedIn introduction session will be held on Tuesday 15 October at 10 am (UK time). Places are limited, so find out more and book now to avoid disappointment. (Depending on demand we will run more sessions in the future).
Aleem and Nicc participated in a Conversation of Change workshop that we ran in partnership with People’s Voice Media. This was led by Isaac Samuels and Samantha -Jane Ofoegbu as part of our continuing efforts to promote anti-racism in co-production. Fifteen people took part in the work workshop with us. We discussed how racism plays out in our own work, practice and organisation and how we can be more actively anti-racist. We also started to work on actions we as individuals and as a collective of organisations/networks can take to address racism in co-production.
We’re also excited to share that Shoba Poduval, who is a member of our Allies Group, and Aradhna Kaushal have been awarded a UCL Population Health Sciences ‘Improving Research Culture’ small grant. They are developing an online training package focused on creative research outputs, which are crucial for effectively communicating findings and engaging broader audiences. This training package includes examples from UCL researchers, such as podcasts, animations, and events, along with a step-by-step guide for early career researchers. You can learn more and accessing the learning package by reading their blog post.
On Thursday 19 September, we will met the participants of the Measuring Success in Co-production programme for our final support session. At this session we asked the teams to reflect on their individual journeys and to learn from each other how this might change the way that they work in the future. Our team have really enjoyed working with the eight projects since January and look forward to pulling together the findings from their reports which we hope will help develop our collective knowledge about evaluating co-production.
Since last spring our team of 14 people, including co-producers, people from the UCL Evaluation Exchange, UCL Grand Challenges and The Academy of Medical Sciences, have been co-producing the Measuring Success in Co-production programme. The eight funded projects are due to report on their work by the end of September. Now that the support sessions have finished, our team are busy evaluating the co-production of the programme itself. This will form part of the collective output from the whole programme, building on what we learnt from the Value of Co-production project.
In 2022 we carried out an end of year survey to help us find out about people’s involvement in Co-Production Collective and what else we can be doing as a community to reach more people and remove barriers to people getting involved. The feedback from the survey was really helpful, so we decided to run it every two years. We are now calling it our ‘Community Survey’ to better reflect what it is as well the fact we are not running it every year. We are now looking for two people to help develop and test our new survey. This is a paid opportunity and should take about 2 hours of your time between October and December. You will be paid £30 in line with our updated payment policy. If you are interested in supporting us with this please email coproduction@ucl.ac.uk by Monday 14 October.
Thank you for those who filled out our Co-Pro Cuppa survey so far and shared your feedback on the Cuppas, and what we can do to improve them.
Your feedback is crucial in helping us improve and evolve the Co-Pro Cuppas to better meet our community’s needs. If you haven’t had the chance to do this yet but put would still like to share your feedback, please fill out this short survey. This should take you no more than five minutes and it will really help us to plan Cuppas in the future.
Thank you for coming to our August Co-Pro Cuppa! It was great to see many of you there and great discussions on a variety of topics including the importance of relationship building in co-production, and the role that trust plays in this. We also talked about the importance of being honest and transparent about what can and can’t be achieved, and the conflict that can arise from allowing the time required for effective coproduction with the pressures that can be felt for delivering ‘outcomes’.
Our next Co-Pro Cuppas will take place on:
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.
Photo credit: Canva
September 26, 2024
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