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ABSS Co-Production: Thoughts from Leaders

A reflection on Co-Production at ABSS.

Introduction

Co-production was central to the ABSS tender to the Lottery – the focus was to drive effective system change. In other words: ensuring that the beneficiaries of the service could design, evaluate and deliver services. This approach to influence and participation allowed staff and people with lived experience to have an equal relationship when designing activities, projects, and services for ABSS. This was a very new way of collaborating to achieve a very different outcome, through enabling people with lived experience to effect change.

 

ABSS ensured that lived experience was not only heard but placed at the heart of decision-making. This approach transformed the way services were shaped, placing families in the role of experts and collaborators, rather than simply recipients of support.

Managing co-production

Managing a co-production process involves creating a collaborative and inclusive environment where all participants feel truly valued, so they feel empowered and enabled to contribute. It’s about ensuring everyone has equity of opportunities, equity of access to information, and the appropriate on-going support they need to participate effectively.


Successful co-production requires careful planning, clear communication, and a willingness to adapt, learn and change throughout the process.


Managing a co-production process can be hard work, and needs a lot of time, patience and the appropriate level of resources to be committed to the process, and all these need to be embedded from the very start.


Co-production cannot just be a decoration that is added to a standard process, or a ‘tick box’ exercise.

“It was challenging as a concept – textbook definitions tell you an idealised version of what co-production should be – an equal distribution of power ....and that is scary I think.... but at the heart are the normal human values or respecting each other, listening to each other. There is something very human at the heart of co-production – about people working together well, people who have gone on a journey and a process together creating successes and making mistakes. It’s the overall experience that matters – that feeling from everybody of being included and involved is the important thing .”
Alex Khaldi, Independent Chair of ABSS

Representation

When setting up the co-production approach in Southend, it was important to ensure that there was representation from all ABSS wards and from all communities. What this meant was that people came from different places, with very different lived experiences, different views and different ideas about what was needed.

 

Encouraging open and honest conversations across a wide range of people from many local communities creates a truly meaningful, strengths-based collaborative approach to co-production.

Location

When setting up co-production, it is also important to come out of the corporate spaces and go into the heart of the community, so it is tangible, accessible and really connected to the community. Location is important. Every engagement with parents/the community must fully demonstrate the commitment to co-production, and that includes ensuring locations are genuinely accessible to everyone involved.

Asset-Based Community Development

Staff in the City Council went through Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) training. Training people in the ABCD approach is essential to ensuring a positive approach across all participants. ABCD is a community development approach that focuses on a community’s strengths and assets, rather than deficits and problems. It involves identifying and mobilising existing resources and skills within a community to empower residents to drive change from within.

 

This approach contrasts with more deficit-based approaches. ABCD aims to build more resilient and connected communities, and this was fundamental to the effective co-production framework in ABSS.

 

ABCD training is recommended because of the focus on starting from community strengths, skills and resources, rather than the more usual negative route of starting from problems or deficits and trying to remedy them.

Power Dynamics

Be mindful of potential actual or perceived power imbalances and ensure that everyone genuinely feels they have a voice and a real opportunity to influence decisions. Imbalances can be created even if this is not the intention.

 

Consider things like senior staff wearing suits or staff wearing lanyards, which can confer a perceived ‘status’ on some participants that others do not have, in turn creating just such an imbalance.

 

Equality means providing the same to all, equity means recognising that we do not all start from the same place, and we must acknowledge and adjust imbalances accordingly.

 

Values at the core of ABSS co-production approach were actively built on equity:

  • Listening to each other as equal participants in the process
  • Respecting others’ opinions
  • Working co-operatively together
  • Actively breaking down participation barriers
  • Recognising the equal value of what everyone has to say, no matter what their background, knowledge or experience

In managing co-production, it is important to foster a collaborative and trusting environment where people in the community feel comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns, as well as sharing personal information about their lived experience. They need to know that this information will be listened to with empathy and understanding, and that it will be acknowledged as often difficult to share. They want to know that their ideas will truly be listened to and valued. This can be achieved through open and respectful communication, active listening, mutual respect and empathy.

 

This level of equity is a key and significant part of the legacy of ABSS, and as a result there will continue to be a commitment in Southend to listening to the parent voice into the future.

Southend’s Parent Voice

Southend City Council and SAVS want to carry on collaborating with parents to share their lived experience to shape services. People who are pregnant and/or an existing parent with a child or children aged 0-11 years are encouraged to become Parent Voice Ambassadors and be part of meaningful discussions with partners across Local Authority, Health and Education.

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