Micro level impacts

CoSIE provides strong qualitative evidence that co-creation activities or even sensemaking about co-creation may make some profound differences in individual’s lives. Much of this is about empowering experiences  – people supported by a service expressed subjective feeling of being engaged and needed in new ways. Hungarian, Finish, Spanish cases serve as good examples among many. In most cases, individuals from the targeted “hard to reach” service “recipient” groups considered joint thinking, working together and meeting with each other as an outstanding innovation of the service or program. Partners have commented that people who are the targets of public services have sometimes been easier to reach than anticipated, and it is important not to make assumptions but be agile and open to surprises.

There are also some material changes in situations that led people to access services, such removal from unemployment lists (Spain) and increased household incomes (Hungary). Nevertheless, often anticipated co-creation outcomes are s time demanding (e g reduced offending and healthier lifestyles) and were more difficult to document within the timescale of the project.

At the service provider side, we could evidence of change in approaches to the service recipients and to the roles in service cycle and service improvement. These collaborative successes together with social benefits for individuals’, can perhaps best be seen as the accumulating of ‘small wins’ (Termeer and Dewulf, 2018).

The co-creative impacts on service level may be illustrated by Valencian model, Spain, where individuals’ with lived experiences during dialogues with service actors in  Co-Crea-Te digital platform succeeded to reframe (part of) municipal employment services to assist those who were looking for self-employment as a means of exiting unemployment and financial hardship. The service became a means of creating a community that inspired and enabled people to reduce the risk of entering into a business venture. In this, it was successful: 380 people have been through the Co-Crea-Te scheme and around 50 per cent of those people have been removed from unemployment lists.