Making change stick: Revolving Doors’ toolkits for co-production

Lucy Woods
Senior Involvement Manager

For the past five years Revolving Doors has supported the Changing Futures programme, using our expertise in bringing together lived and learned experience to support people experiencing multiple disadvantage. 

Our approach to co-production recognises the insights people with lived experience offer. First-hand perspectives bridge the crucial policy and practice gap, challenge assumptions, reveal blind spots, and inspire innovation from the very start of the process, not as an afterthought.  

Undertaken in earnest, with mutual respect, co-production with lived and learned experience ensures decisions are informed by real-world understanding. This helps decisionmakers grasp not only what needs to change, but why and how to make that change stick.  

Revolving Doors’ model of coproduction gives us crucial insight – shaped, always, by our members – into the value of lived experience at every level: from policymaking, to commissioning of services, to governing. We know that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution, yet too often furthest away from resources and power. Policies work better in practice when everyone’s knowledge is combined in designing them.  

To acknowledge the impact of this work, Revolving Doors has created three guides to co-production, as tools designed to support and encourage more lived experience at the front and centre of tackling multiple disadvantage, and shaping systems change. 

Joint commissioning with lived experience

Why lived experience must be part of policy design:

Why lived experience must shape governance:

A complete guide to commissioning, policy-making and shaping governance with lived experience:

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