Great ideas and inspiring stories about communities, collaboration and co-production.
Read about the people who are getting on and making things happen.
One of our new critical friends is George Fielding BEM, who spoke to us about his compelling motivations for community work and life in general. George has raised more than £15 million for charities since becoming an advocate for young wheelchair users at age 12.
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This blog features one of the joint winners: Gloucestershire Creative Health Consortium, made up of Art Shape; Mindsong; The Music Works; Artlift and Artspace. They all work in partnership to provide high quality, personalised, inclusive and accessible creative health services for people experiencing psychological and/or physical challenges.
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This blog features joint winner, The Grenfell Memorial Community Mosaic, which has Brough almost one thousand local people from North Kensington together to make large scale public artworks. Co-created with individuals and local community, resident, faith and school groups under the guidance of mosaic artists Emily Fuller and Tomomi Yoshida, the project enabled people to connect and to memorialise the Grenfell Tower tragedy through personal and collective creativity.
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This blog features the 2.8 Million Minds project. Between November 2021 and May 2022, over 120 people contributed to A Manifesto for 2.8 Million Minds, a youth-led, artist-centred, and Disability Justice-informed approach to how young Londoners want to use art to begin to radically reimagine mental health support, justice and pride.
This blog features Kooth, a digital mental health service providing online support from self-help to peer support and structured counselling. They worked with two grassroots organisations – BLKOUT and Cultures CIC to understand black men's relationship with their mental health and the challenges they face in accessing effective services.
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This blog features the North West London Suicide Prevention Project, which connects organisations across North West London Integrated Care System, including the voluntary sector, local authorities and the NHS. Using the principles of generous leadership, this programme is based on alliance building and a social response to suicide prevention.
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Union Chapel share their experiences of their community leaders project which was shortlisted for the Collective Power Award with the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance’s (CHWA) annual awards which focus on collective power (partnership and co-production), practitioner support and climate.
We really enjoyed and valued gathering face-to-face for the first UK Alliancing in Health and Social Care Symposium in Birmingham on 8 November 2022. Not only was it amazing to catch up with people we had only met and worked with online, but it was hugely productive to have conversations about how far alliancing has come in the past ten years, how to bring others to the table, and what we need to do next.
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This blog features National Museums Liverpool’s Connecting with Yemeni Elders’ Heritage project, which was inspired by a young man Abdul, from Liverpool’s Yemeni community, who wanted to support elders living with dementia through the House of Memories programme. Abdul connected and encouraged more than 40 Yemeni young people to support the development of a dual language (Arabic and English) heritage package within the My House of Memories app, to assist elders to capture and digitize their heritage stories and traditions to share with younger people.
Year 2 of Not Another Co-Production Project has begun in the West Midlands. This is a three-year lottery funded project run by the Ideas Alliance in partnership with People's Voice Media. The 12 organisations we are partnering with to embed collaboration and co-production into their work, had an introductory meeting, where Sophie Ewan-Roberts took visual notes.
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Last year, we were privileged to work with the Elephants Trail in Manchester as part of our lottery-funded Not Another Co-Production Project. Patrick Tierney, Elephants Trail member, shares his brilliant blog post, Road of Restoration, which considers the role of hope in our lives and recovery journeys.
In autumn 2021, Dudley Council commissioned the Ideas Alliance to help them get a better understanding of how the pandemic had impacted on people’s lives, in order to inform priorities for the future. The brief included the use of storytelling and one requested outcome was a visual representation of the experiences of the people of Dudley.
Winning Hearts and Minds is a joined-up approach in north Manchester to improve people’s long-term heart and mental health by stepping outside the traditional approaches to health improvement. They share their ethos on measuring impact.
Selva Mustafa shares her process of visually recording events after her experience at the Not Another Co-Production Festival in Manchester.
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Following a brilliant first year full of ups, downs and lots of learning together in Manchester, we are ready to begin year two of our lottery funded three-year Not Another Co-Production project in partnership with People's Voice Media. We are on the hunt for at least 12 organisations across the West Midlands to partner with from autumn 2022 to summer 2023.
“The Hub acts as a glue bringing together people and organisations who are doing so much to positively disrupt their local systems.”
Burcu Borysik, Mayday Trust