Our Working Together Board

Our Working Together Board was established in November 2023, and we co-produced our Mission Statement to be ‘A community led collaboration of stakeholders, taking a critical friend approach to reshape the role and delivery of adult social care in Somerset in order to support people to live the lives they choose’

The Working Together Board meets on a quarterly basis co-chaired by the Executive Director for Adult Services in Somerset, and an Expert by Experience elected from the membership of the board. We have established three subgroups which include – Co-designing our Adult Social Care website, Practice Quality Board and our Learning Disability and Preparing for Adulthood Strategic Co-Production Steering Group.

We have also identified opportunities through Experts By Experience Leaders to work as equal partners in Open Mental Health to transform the way the whole system works and hopefully leading to better outcomes for people. This is a trailblazing model of working which means that the voice of lived experience is central to decision making. This is exciting and dynamic and gives those Leaders a great experience and transferrable skills as well as steering system wide decisions.

We have also an active research project with Open Storytellers, funded through a community grant scheme to support people with learning disabilities and autism in Somerset. The project is trying different approaches to promoting self-advocacy around Somerset to identify what works well. Open Storytellers have begun by setting up a project team and the ‘Our Self Advocacy’ brand. They have also launched ‘The Big Somerset Self-Advocacy survey’ (to map current activity, connect with others and identify what is important to the learning disability community in Somerset).

We are also working to re-establish our Learning Disability Partnership Board, taking a ground-up approach that includes the work being undertaken to rebuild our self-advocacy support for people with learning disabilities. The first meeting of the new Board will take place in early 2025/26 with the intention of it becoming a powerful voice that drives the agenda in the future and holds system leaders to account.