What is co-production?
Our Service Users are important. We believe that people with lived experience have the best ideas about services which are important and work.
We will actively engage our service users at Co-Design and Co-Production levels.
To do this we intend to hold training, regular focus groups and planning events in the coming months.
From these sessions we will develop Reps who will help us to review and design services for the Durham Mental Wellbeing Alliance.
We also want to showcase the many talents of our service users by using their creative outputs in our publicity materials, via an annual celebration and community art exhibitions or performances.
Resources
We’ve Co-produced ‘The Little Book of Anxiety’ booklet with our service users for mental heath awareness week. We have also co-produced a new ‘Valued Voices Newsletter’ for you to read.
Our name and logo
We decided it was essential that our logo and name be decided by our service users.
In September 2021 we launched a competition and invited service users from across the alliance to take part. We had around 20 responses and choosing the winning design was a difficult task. We enlisted the help of our local Labour M.P, Mary Foy, to choose the winning design. Mary loved the positivity and energy of the smiley face design. The blue circles represent Alliance partners and the yellow face our service users. The colours were chosen because blue and yellow are the County’s colours.
We would like to thank the service users and staff of St Margaret’s Centre who worked collectively on this design. We also asked people to vote on our name, it was felt that Durham Mental Wellbeing Alliance was memorable and to the point.
The logo ultimately represents our desire to join together to provide better support to people in County Durham.