This week, the Living Life to the Fullest team is celebrating the fourth annual Co-production Week and Festival, 1 – 5 July 2019, run by the Social Care Institute for Excellence. The theme for 2019 is ‘Sharing Power’.

In celebration of this special week, which advocates the benefits of co-production and encourages people to share good practice, our Lead Co-Researcher Lucy Watts MBE has produced a brilliant podcast about the ways in which we enact co-production in our ESRC-funded research project, Living Life to the Fullest.

We centre the Co-Researcher Collective, a group of disabled young women living with life limiting and life threatening impairments (LL/LTIs), who are co-leading the project with a small team of academics from the University of Sheffield.

Check out Co-Producing Research With Young Disabled People – Episode 2, Lucy’s Light (44.51) here on Audioboom! See its blurb below:

Living Life To The Fullest: A research project looking at the lives, hopes, desires and contributions of disabled children and young people, and their families. This project is co-produced with young disabled women in the form of the “Co-Researcher Collective”, who, unlike many projects, are not just part of the project as subjects or PPI support, these Co-Researchers have been part of every aspect of the project from data collection to data analysis, as well as writing-up our work, and of other interrelated projects of the project, which include a (work in progress) co-production toolkit, an (in progress) book about our work and experiences, our blog, attending conferences, and other side-projects. In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Kirsty Liddiard of the University of Sheffield, the lead researcher, and Sally Whitney, one of our Co-Researcher Collective members, who discuss the Living Life To The Fullest project, our work, how we’ve achieved what we’ve done, and what co-production is, how it has benefitted our project, and how others can learn from what we’ve done (Lucy Watts MBE, 2019).

Feel free to tweet us at @FullLivesESRC and tell us what you think! Don’t forget to use the hashtag #CoProWeek.

Rachel*, age 10