Designing work rather than making suggestions

By Angela Slater, Senior Lived Experience Leadership Officer at Mind

As part of SCIE’s Co-production week on 1-5th July 2019 we are holding a staff event on 3rd July at our head offices in Stratford to highlight the many positives and benefits of co-producing work and sharing power. It is a big part of our values and goals at Mind to involve people who experience mental health problems in all of our work and something that we aim to continuously develop. 

Co-production is an increasingly common concept in the influence & participation work that we do at Mind, as well as for organisations that we work with. For us the difference between co-production and other methods of influence and participation that we use is that in co-production people with lived experience play an equal role in both designing and delivering work, rather than making suggestions that professionals are responsible for deciding upon and implementing. Here at Mind we would like to see this happening where ever possible in our work.

With this in mind we will be co-producing our co-production event aimed at the increasing number of staff at Mind head offices to attend. Seven people with lived experience are joining myself and three Mind Influence & Participation Coaches to design and deliver the event. As we work together we we are starting to see what we want the key outcomes to be, what the event will look like and how it will be delivered- so watch this space….

To help with our work around involving people Mind has created an Influence & Participation Toolkit which is a comprehensive resource designed to develop understanding and support the meaningful involvement of people with lived experience of a mental health problems in the development of organisations and their services. It is available publicly for anyone to use and can be found here. 
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 We are always looking for examples of good practise from different organisations including examples around co-production so if you have a piece of work that would make a good case study then please do get in touch with us at LivedExp@mind.org.uk 

Current case studies about co-production can be seen here.