Reproducing Co-Production and Upscaling Innovation: The Growth of Forums Supporting Desistance

Abstract

This guest post offers reflexive discussion of the challenges and opportunities of reproducing and upscaling co-productive forums and ventures which support desistance. Consideration of the impact of growth and change on participants’ perceptions of trust and legitimacy are threaded throughout (following on from another recent blog post on 8th May on this website on trust and legitimacy in co-producing desistance). In this post, the focus is on forums and ventures which seek to support and co-produce desistance, ranging from mutual aid groups, peer mentoring and service user/peer advocacy forums, to cooperatives, time banks, creative arts initiatives, and social enterprises for people with convictions, through to big picture participative social action initiatives and awareness raising campaigns. As ground-breaking and exciting as they are, establishing these types of forums and ventures can be hard work. However, this post looks further downstream to consider what happens when an innovative initiative is successful, and its members are thinking about the opportunities and challenges of making it more widely available and mainstream.