Co-production

As Britain has built its welfare state over the last 60 years, we have abandoned the potential of human capabilities. People have become passive, powerless, unskilled and apparently ignorant service users and patients, needing things put right for them by paid professionals. For a sustainable future, we must kick the habit of passively consuming services and reclaim our capabilities. This means becoming co-producers of our well-being.

Co-production goes well beyond user involvement or citizen engagement. It promotes equal partnership between service workers and those intended to benefit from their services – pooling different kinds of knowledge and skill, and working together. This project seeks to transform public services by building in co-production so that they become sustainable and produce better outcomes.

It builds models of co-production around a set of core values:

• recognising that people have assets, not just problems
• redefining work so that unpaid activities are valued and supported
• building reciprocity and mutual exchange
• strengthening and extending social networks.

nef's aim is to establish co-production as a new paradigm for designing and delivering services. We are doing this by identifying and learning from existing practice, developing guidance, and producing tools to help service providers in the public and third sectors change the way they work so that that co-production becomes central to their practice.