When Oldham Positive Action Network came to Ideas Alliance for support with their Local Motion programme they already had great instincts – they just needed some help with the structure.
Local Motion is a place-based systems change programme, operating across six places including Oldham. It works with people who have lived experience of poverty, housing insecurity, and financial exclusion, helping them shape solutions to the issues that affect them most.
John Atherton and Laura Norris had been doing a great job at co-production through trial and error. They had built a group of fifteen local lived experience advisers, and had been running community conversations and testing a range of workshop formats. “We kind of made it up as we went along,” John reflects. “It’s been really useful talking to somebody who has done this process many times before – you get a sense of what works and what doesn’t.”
Ideas Alliance’s Kerry Bertram worked with them through a series of online and in-person coaching sessions. Their focus was a new co-production project on financial inclusion, commissioned by Oldham Council.
Strengths first
Rather than starting from scratch, Kerry helped John and Laura look honestly at what they already had. Their lived experience adviser group was a real asset, and the coaching helped them lean into that more deliberately. They worked on involving advisers in the design of questions, the format of sessions, and the shape of the workshops themselves.
One of the most significant shifts was in how the team approached sense-making. Laura says: “I was very much focused on the voices of people impacted by lived experience, but not necessarily thinking about how we were working alongside all the people with relevant experience.” That meant bringing frontline workers – welfare rights advisers, citizens advice workers, people who support rough sleepers day-to-day – into the room as fully fledged contributors, not just attendees. These are experts by experience, and the coaching helped the team to trust that instinct rather than second-guess it.
Go where people are
The amplification phase involved lived experience advisers going out into the community – like to parks, family events and community venues – to have conversations on people’s own terms.
“A local authority leader in a recent meeting asked how they could get people to come to their events,” John recalls. “I just said: go where people are. For us now that’s common sense, but some professionals are stuck in a very traditional way of thinking. We need to be mindful to create, and be in spaces the people we want to talk to are comfortable, even if that is at the expense of our own comfort.”
What’s grown from it
The outcomes speak to the power of co-production. Three workstreams are now active: a community land trust, secure lockers for people experiencing rough sleeping, and education and training for asylum seekers so they can navigate the misinformation around housing options.
But perhaps the most striking result has been the transformation of the lived experience adviser group itself. Following this project, they approached Laura with a training idea of their own – a package called Valuing Lived Experience in Co-Production, designed and delivered by them, aimed at inspiring local authority leaders to work differently. “We’re really good at this stuff,” one adviser said at a recent session. And they’re right!
OPAN is a local infrastructure organisation for the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise (VCFSE) sector in Oldham, Rochdale, and Tameside. Ideas Alliance is a social consultancy bringing people’s voices and lived experiences into policy, service design and decision-making. If you’d like to work with us we’d love to hear from you – head to our websites to get in touch.
