Empowering recovery

As part of Co-production Week 2025, we caught up with EDIFY Research Assistant Tamsin about why co-production is important in the work that they do.

Why is co-production important?

Co-production research is important because it reduces hierarchies, allows for equal knowledge exchange, and recognises the value in different kinds of expertise.

What was your project about (Empowering Recovery)?

The aim of Empowering Recovery was to co-produce digital resources with young people from the UK who have lived experience of an eating disorder. The digital resources were intended to support other young people when navigating social media with an eating disorder. Specifically, they were intended to offer peer-to-peer advice on (a) viewing eating disorder recovery content on social media safely and mindfully, and (b) posting about your eating disorder recovery on social media in a mindful way.

How was Beat involved in your project? What did you find beneficial when working with us?

Beat was responsible for recruitment for our project, and they also provided us with co-production training which was invaluable. On the day of the in-person workshop, Beat's social media officer provided support and advice to the experts by experience as they co-produced the resources.

We found the co-production training to be extremely useful. We learned about group agreements and temperature checks for well-being which we implemented in our co-production workshops. Also, we felt that the feedback given to the experts by experience on their plan for the resources was really helpful and supportive.

What motivated you to engage in co-production for your project?

Our existing research highlighted that there were very few resources for young people who wanted to post on social media about their ED recovery but didn't want to trigger anyone else. Rather than offering advice from a charity or clinician perspective, we wanted other young people who were experiencing the same thing to share their tips and advice.

What have you learned from this process that you would apply to future projects?

I have seen how powerful good co-production research can be and this has motivated me to consider how we can incorporate more co-production research into our project(s) going forward.