Join me on a meander through considerations of sharing space and migration, gender roles, wealth and status, and how social change can begin with looking at things from different angles.

For anyone commissioning or running work with experts by experience.

I recently heard a young adult involved in service design describe what it felt like to be brought into consultation meetings with senior leaders: she called it being asked to ‘put on the show’.

She was referring to the familiar request to share personal stories on demand: talk about the impact of the hardship she had faced, recount private struggles to a room of professionals, or provide emotional resonance for decision-makers.

Involving the people closest to a social issue in designing, delivering, and evaluating services – often described as ‘co-production’ (collaborating as equals with service users) or working with ‘experts by experience’ (people whose authority comes from having lived through the challenge) – is now fairly standard across social services, public bodies, and charities. When done well, it shifts institutional power and leads to services that make a real difference.

And yet, after twenty years in participatory work, I see the same systemic pitfalls recurring. Co-production fails in five predictable ways - here they are, with counter measures you can actually implement.

This weekend, I met a friend for lunch and a stroll through the park. As we shared our news, lamented the price of a coffee in a central London café and promised to meet for wholesome Sunday walks more often, I felt a familiar sense of being re-resourced by taking time to relax, reconnect and enjoy some time out in nature. This was briefly disrupted by unexpectedly passing a far-right rally in the park – suddenly, the two of us seemed significantly outnumbered by people who would likely wish harm on us and many others. We moved on and inevitably spent a long time discussing the state of the world and how we might respond to an increasing sense of division and uncertainty. I reflected on what helps me to keep things in perspective and feel safe when things feel scary and hopeless, and immediately thought of various communities that I’m part of, and the concepts of mutual support and safety in numbers. I also remembered some tools from trauma therapy, like Babette Rothschild’s oases, anchors and safe places, which are helpful in addressing feelings of overwhelm and detachment. Bringing the therapeutic concepts and the idea of community together, I’ve been considering community as a form of anchor, which might serve to keep us grounded and connected.

The word ‘resilience’ has become one of the ubiquitous buzzwords that has been favoured in fields from education, to workplace wellbeing, to psychology (in both pop and clinical forms) for quite some time. While I’m in favour of finding ways to pick ourselves back up when we’ve been knocked down – and occasionally even partial to a Kelly Clarkson karaoke moment – I find myself asking questions whenever the concept of resilience comes up. I might wonder whether it’s the most helpful word to use in the given context, and how it’s being understood. For example, I used to offer wellbeing support to a woman who had been through an extraordinary amount of adversity and trauma in her life. When I met her, she still faced some significant challenges, but the way she had turned things around and overcome massive obstacles was remarkable. Any time people heard her story, they would comment on how unusually resilient she was. There’s no denying the truth of that, but she internalised the message that she was ‘a resilient person’, and struggled to reconcile this with her experience on days when she felt overwhelmed and less able to cope.

For leaders and managers in charities and public services.

Across the charity and public sectors, many professionals are at their edges, resources are strained, and the divide between leadership and frontline teams is widening. Staff are often asked to stretch caseloads and boundaries to breaking point. Words and phrases like ‘burnout’, ‘dehumanising’, and ‘taken for granted’ dominate conversations with exhausted, disappointed workers.

Charities and not-for-profits being asked to do more with less is not a new phenomenon. But the pressures have intensified, and a crucial aspect of how this plays out is the way that those in the driving seat choose to allocate resources, design workloads, and communicate with their staff. The picture can look bleak, but there are choices to be made and space to be taken: re-imagining how we work together to bring about sustainable, meaningful change for service users and the workforce alike.

Exploring national myth making, rituals and our collective psyche. Might we have an opportunity to re-think these?