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What Is Co-Production™?

Working Together to Achieve a Mission

'Co-Production™' is about working together for a strong community and more effective social services. It starts from the idea that services are successful only when the people being served are involved. Teaching is an example. A teacher will teach, but learning happens when students become engaged. That principle can be taken into almost every field of service. If clients don’t become actively engaged in achieving a successful outcome, the service provider will not succeed alone. (Click here for a history of Co-Production™)

Time Banking takes the basic ideas of Co-Production™ and builds on the fact that people naturally want to give back, to make a difference, just as professional providers do. With Co-Production™ that giving back is encouraged. Recipients become partners and participants in building successful outcomes.

We can take the Five Core Values of Time Banking and apply them to the basic idea of Co-Production™ in the fields of social services to create a renewed sense of membership, belonging and joint ownership in positive outcomes. This calls for all of the Five Core Values. Taking each in turn, this means that:

Clients become valued as assets.
Their contributions are valued – and rewarded – as real work.
Reciprocity between clients and professionals leads to mutually rewarding support and stronger outcomes all round.
Clients and service providers all contribute in ways that build a web of mutual support.
There is respect for each and for what each brings to the table.

Why is Co-Production™ important?

The ideals of Co-Production™ stand in strong contrast to the almost visible gulf between professional helpers, their clients, and the local community that usually exists today. Wherever you look, you will find:

An expanding number of professional service providers using all their professional training and skills to hold back an ever rising tide of need. They are operating within systems that do not solicit the active support of the people they are trying to help.
Clients competing for scarce services and then consuming them in a sort of learned helplessness, taking little responsibility for themselves.
Disconnected and powerless communities who are suspicious of the massive institutions around them and seemingly unaware that they hold the key to the collective efficacy that could change things.
People with money who are paying for the services that family, neighborhood and community used to provide. Too often, we are isolated from our neighbors, our families are spread out across the country, and we don’t know who to turn to for support when we need help to take care of the fragile members of our families

With Co-Production™ as an approach, and with the Five Core Values in place, we know we can do better. Time Banking provides a way to put those principles into practice. It is not the only way to do that. But it is a very effective way.

A second kind of partnering…

The partnership between professionals, clients, and community is basic to Co-Production™. But there is another kind of partnership that is equally important. That’s the relationship between the world of money and the world of home, neighborhood and community.

For social services to succeed, these two worlds must also partner with each other to co-produce positive outcomes. We get a better sense of how to make that happen when we see how home and community act as a special kind of economic system. The pages on the Core Economy explore this topic in more depth and will fill out your understanding of Co-Production™.

For more on Co-Production™ and the economic theory that underlies it, you can read No More Throw-Away People, Edgar Cahn’s book about Time Banking and Co-Production™.