This paper from the New Economics Foundation offers an explanation of co-production, or a means of building community based on a sense of shared responsibility and mutual support. The point of co-production, according to the paper, is to encourage the use of human skills and experience to help deliver public or voluntary service. Rather than defining community members by their needs, co-production defines individuals based on the skills they possess and ways in which they can contribute to public service. Genuine co-production, according to the paper, will always: define public service clients as assets who have skills that are vital to the delivery of services; define work to include anything that people do to support each other; include some element of reciprocity; build community; and support resilience.
