April 1, 2021
Welcome to the second of our new series where we (the Co-Production Collective team) share what’s keeping us busy each month.
The first day of April started as every day should – with a cuppa! Our Co-Pro Cuppa took place this morning (1 April) and with no April fools in sight, we had brilliant morning chatting about getting started in co-production, language and definitions, and the need for services to get out to where people are rather than trying to bring them in. Our Cuppas take place every month and are simply a chance to get together and chat all things co-production. Everyone is welcome, especially if you’re new to Co-Production Collective and would like to dip your toe in. You can sign up to May and June’s Cuppas now - we’d love to see you there!
We’re in the lucky position of having a week off over the Easter break, so things might be a little quieter than normal after today, but we will hit the ground running when we’re back on Monday 12 April….
Top of our to-do list is to prepare the next steps for two key pieces of co-creation – how we make decisions around our funding, and our payment policy.
We held a very lively co-creation session at the end of March where we explored the decisions we need to make around who we decide to partner with or take funding from, coming away with a few concrete answers and lots more questions! There will be a blog sharing reflections on this soon, as well as a chance to continue the co-creation process offline/via a shared document.
As many of you will know, we started co-creating our payment policy at the end of 2020 and will be moving this forward with two co-creation sessions in May. This month we’ll be working on incorporating all the co-creation feedback we’ve had so far into a new draft, before focusing on some of the most important and challenging aspects in the sessions themselves. We’ll share more information over the next few weeks, but in the meantime please do sign up to join the sessions on Friday 7 May and Tuesday 18 May.
Finally, on Tuesday 20 April we’re hosting the first Co-Production Collective Get Together (formerly known as the Co-Production Network) for 2021! These sessions are a chance to come together around a specific theme and in April we will be exploring inclusive approaches to monitoring the diversity of co-producers or participants at events or activities. What is the best way to ask questions about people’s identities? How can we do this in a meaningful way that doesn’t reinforce inequalities? Join us to share your thoughts and experiences – sign-up here.
Beyond the development of Co-Production Collective itself, we’ll be enjoying our usual busy schedule of meeting and collaborating with others trying to do similar work. In April we’re getting together with our friends at Scope, who are in the process of embedding co-production across the whole organisation, as well as attending Camden’s Co-Production Network and chatting to the Big Lemon team about the next phase of website development. Watch this space….
In other project work, we’ll be delivering the second of four training sessions for the international team involved in the Neotree project. People will be joining from Malawi, Zimbabwe and England for a practical session about how to co-produce. We will also be working with The Mental Elf, UCL Hospital’s Biomedical Research Centre and the Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences to support training sessions for UCL staff and postgraduate students to help them close the gap between research and practice. Finally, we’re very excited for our brand new partnership with NHS England and Improvement to get underway – catch-up with what we’ve got planned.
As ever, there’s lots of opportunities for you to get involved! Please do join one of our sessions, join the conversation on Twitter, or drop us a line at coproduction@ucl.ac.uk. We won’t be responding during 2-11 April unless it’s really urgent, but we look forward to reading and responding to any messages as soon as we can once we’re back from the break.
Chat soon!
Interested in finding out more or exploring how we could work together?
Co-Produce with us