Our co-production journey
We’re on a journey to change the way we work by collaborating and co-designing more of the services we offer with our customers.
Throughout the past few years, we’ve been exploring co-production and how we can do this well. As part of this, we’ve worked on some fantastic projects and with some great organisations including:
Stronger Together: A co-production toolkit
Asset based community development, co-production and strengths-based approaches are at the heart of the work we do – including growing communities – but what do they actually mean?
Strengths-based approaches
This approach discovers and builds on people’s strengths rather than on problems. This way of working increases hope and self-reliance, and shows that everyone has the power to learn, grow and change. It builds relationships and community members participate in decisions, make choices, and determine the direction of the development.
Find out more about how our training can support you to:
- Gain an understanding of strengths-based practice and its underlying values
- Develop good engagement methods
- Increase your knowledge and skills for working with people and communities
Asset Based Community Development
Asset based community development builds on the assets within a community, linking them so that everyone can grow together.
Every community or neighbourhood is different. They each have their own set of unique assets which can be developed for everyone’s benefit. These assets could be people or organisations – we believe that everyone in the community has something to contribute. By bringing all these assets together, the community is more connected, stronger, and able to sustain their own development.
In our training we’ll pull from our learning from our Well Rotherham programme so that you:
- Feel enabled to take asset-based community development into neighbourhoods to create empowered, healthier and connected communities
- Learn from our experiences and stories so that you have the tools to create a strategy
At Well Rotherham we believe that communities hold the knowledge to make themselves stronger. To capture this learning, we worked our amazing community connectors to create a guide to support others to become more active in their communities.
If you would like to learn more download our free guide to getting active in your community – a digital resource for anyone who wants to start building communities, and is interested in learning from the experience of others.
Download our free guide (PDF)
Co-production
Co-production is a meeting of minds and hearts to reach a shared solution. It’s people working together to design and deliver community projects and services with meaningful and sustainable impact. For us the core principles are:
- Collaboration
- Respect
- Empowerment
- Involvement
Stronger Together: A Co-production Toolkit from Ageing Better is a big part of Growing Communities. Co-production was at the heart to Ageing Better’s work and the voices of older people were involved within every aspect of the programme. From the design, delivery through to evaluation of services, projects and activities.
The programme was funded by The National Lottery Community Fund and we were 1 of 14 partners who worked on the programme and co-created the toolkit. Whilst learning within the toolkit focuses on enhancing the health and wellbeing of older people, the learning is translatable to any area or setting.
We want to share all this fantastic learning with you. Which is why, in our training session you’ll:
- Gain information, tools and resources to understand what co-production is and how to put it into practice
- Learn how to co-produce services and projects that are sustainable, inclusive and fully representative of people within your community
