Since February this year, Race Equality Foundation has been working with the Co-Production Collective and National Voices on a project, commissioned by the NHS Race and Health Observatory, to develop a practical resource to support anti-racist co-production across health and care.
Co-production is now widely discussed across the sector, but it is not always clear what it means in practice. People and communities are still often asked to share their views after decisions have already been made, or invited into processes where power still sits mainly with organisations rather than people with lived experience of the issues affected by policies.
This is particularly significant in relation to racial inequality. If racism is not named directly, and if people with lived experience of racism are not able to shape decisions from the start, then co-production can become a box-ticking exercise, leaving power imbalances and racial inequalities unchallenged.
To address this, we are developing an interactive digital resource to help organisations move beyond good intentions and work towards genuinely anti-racist co-production. It will offer practical guidance on how to share power, centre lived experience, build accountability, close feedback loops and create safer, more inclusive co-production spaces.
The project is being shaped with a Soundboard, made up of eight people with lived experience and community expertise. The Soundboard plays a central role in keeping the work grounded and helping to hold the project accountable. This has had a significant role in defining the project’s values, emerging design principles, evaluation approach and co-design process from the beginning – helping us to ensure that the development process of the resource follows the anti-racist co-production principles we are seeking to promote.
What we have done so far
The first phase reviewed existing co-production and community participation resources to understand what is already available, what works well and where the gaps are. We found that while there is a growing body of guidance, many resources do not go far enough in naming racism, addressing power or setting out clear mechanisms for accountability. From this, we arrived at a set of design principles to underpin the resource.
Over summer, we began co-designing the resource through workshops, interviews and lived experience storytelling. We recruited twelve workshop participants, bringing together lived experience, community and system perspectives. These joined the Soundboard across five co-design workshops. Some Soundboard members also took on paid co-facilitation roles, helping to shape and deliver the workshops and bringing lived experience into the design and delivery of the sessions themselves.
Across the workshops, participants moved from broad discussion about what an anti-racist co-production resource needs to achieve towards practical questions about what organisations need to do differently. The workshops focused on four key areas: sharing power and decision-making, accountability and transparency, collective and psychological safety, and feedback loops and evaluation. Participants developed guidance, reflective questions and case study responses that will now be refined into the resource.
Alongside the workshops, seven interviews were conducted with people from health, care and voluntary sector settings who may use the final resource. These explored how existing resources are used, what barriers prevent anti-racist co-production and what would encourage people to adopt the final resource.
Finally, the Community Reporting method is also part of this work. Through filmed storytelling interviews, people are sharing lived experience stories that help ensure the resource is grounded in people’s own experiences of racism, health and care, and co-production.
Next steps
We are now bringing this learning together in a Co-Design Report, which will be reviewed with workshop participants before being used to shape the draft resource. In continued collaboration with our partners and Soundboard, we will produce, iterate and test the resource over the coming months.
The aim is to create a living, practical tool that supports health and care organisations to move from participation as a process to co-production as a meaningful redistribution of power.
