Roles and accountabilities
In your co-design team, you will have roles and accountabilities as a team, and as an individual in the team.
As a team
As a team, your role is to:
- Co-govern: Decide who will lead your team. It is recommended to have a “co-lead” model, where you have a staff and consumer who will work together to lead the project. You can use this Co-design Terms of Reference Template to outline the governance for your overall project and/or the steering/advisory committee.
- Co-decide: Decide how your team will make key decisions, and which of these can be made by the co-leads and which will be made by the entire team and the process for this (and if there are any key people/groups that need to be involved in all decision making).
- Co-plan: Plan what parts of the project are to be delivered collectively as a team, and what parts will be delivered by individuals. The parts that are planned to be delivered by individuals, form their individual accountabilities and role in the team.
Examples of activities in a project that may be delivered by an individual are:- Consumer engagement may be facilitated by someone with lived experience in your team, therefore this would form one of their individual accountabilities.
- Project plan updates may be prepared by someone who excels at/has a passion for project management
- Co-deliver/co-implement: Work together to implement your co-designed solution into practice. Revisit team roles with implementation in mind, and decide together who else needs to be involved to make this a success.
- Co-evaluate: Decide together what your measures of success will be to demonstrate that you have achieved your objectives of “making it better together”. Decide who will collect this data and who it needs to be communicated to.
The role your team plays in the community is to:
- Build trust in order to listen, engage and amplify community voices, imbedding them in the co-design initiative
- Be accountable to their needs and perspectives
- Communicate the project/initiative to the community
- Build community ownership of the co-design project/initiative
As an individual
Individual accountabilities help to ensure that everyone in the co-design team understands what contribution they are making, and that this contribution can be seen, acknowledged and valued by others in the team. This is key in neutralising power imbalances created by not seeing equal value in all members. Examples of accountabilities to be distributed include:
- Funding/budget coordination
- Community engagement – we recommend that everyone in the co-design team is involved in community engagement with the ‘community’ in which they belong e.g. clinician coordinating engagement amongst their community of clinicians, someone with lived experience coordinating engagement with others with lived experience
- Workshop/consultation activity design
- Feedback organisation (coordination of the Peer Performance Review)
- Setting up meeting times
As an individual, your accountabilities are co-decided and co-planned, as they will vary depending on the project. It is encouraged that each member of the co-design team has some individual accountabilities, to build their individual value in the team.
