Most wellbeing programmes are designed by professionals and delivered to communities. The Birmingham Communities programme started from a different question: what would happen if the community designed it themselves?
The problem with top-down
Wellbeing programmes that are designed outside a community and then brought in to be delivered tend to share a particular limitation. They carry assumptions about what people need, what language resonates, what barriers exist, and what kind of support is actually acceptable.
Sometimes those assumptions are close enough to reality that the programme works reasonably well. Often they are not. The programme sits awkwardly in the context it was designed for. The language does not land. The format does not fit. The people it is meant to serve do not come, or come once and do not return.
Co-production is the attempt to address this by involving the community in the design process from the beginning, not as consultees who are shown a finished product and asked for feedback, but as genuine co-designers whose knowledge and experience shape what gets built.
What co-production looks like in practice
In Birmingham, co-production meant sitting with residents and asking genuinely open questions. What does wellbeing mean in this community? What are the barriers to talking about mental health here? What would a programme need to look like to be trusted and used?
The answers to those questions could not have been predicted from the outside. They reflected the specific cultural context, the specific history, the specific relationships and dynamics of the communities involved. They shaped the content, the format, the language and the delivery model of the programme that emerged.
This is slower than designing something centrally and delivering it. It requires a different kind of relationship between the organisation and the community. It requires genuine humility about what professionals do and do not know. And it produces something that no amount of expert design can replicate: a programme that belongs to the people it is for.
Why belonging matters
A programme that has been designed by a community carries a different kind of authority within that community. When the people delivering it are trusted voices who live the same life as the people they are supporting, the message is received differently. When the content reflects experiences that are genuinely shared rather than approximated, the recognition it produces is more powerful.
This is particularly significant in communities where trust in external institutions and professional services has historically been low. The co-production model does not ask people to trust an organisation. It asks people to trust each other. And that is a fundamentally different ask.
What the Brain Smart framework offers in this context
Brain Smart works in community settings for the same reason it works in prisons and on construction sites: because it is built around human experience rather than clinical category. The brain works the same way in every community. The threat responses are the same. The emotions are the same. The need for understanding is the same.
What co-production allows is for the application of that framework to be genuinely local. The examples, the scenarios, the language, the format: all of these can be shaped by the people who know the community best. The core remains consistent. The delivery becomes something that genuinely belongs.
What we have learned
Co-production takes longer and requires more. More trust-building, more iteration, more willingness to let go of assumptions about what the programme should look like. It is not always comfortable.
But the thing that communities co-design is used, trusted and sustained in a way that externally designed programmes rarely are. And in wellbeing work, where the ultimate goal is lasting change rather than short-term engagement, that sustained use is the whole point.