Create Leaders
HCT Co-Lab
The HCT Co-Lab brought people together from across Gloucestershire to learn how to work differently, together, for fairer health. It grew the collaborative leadership that complex challenges like health inequality demand, the kind of change no single person, organisation or sector can make alone.
How it worked
The first cohort ran from September 2024 to March 2025, part of the wider Healthy Communities Together Gloucestershire programme and funded by The National Lottery Community Fund with support from The King's Fund. Fifteen people completed the programme, working across health and social care, housing, environment, education and community life. It was free to join, with support built in so it would be accessible to a wider range of people.
Over six online and five in-person sessions, with guest speakers and an artist in residence, participants learned and practised new ways of thinking, meeting and leading together, and tried them out in their own workplaces and communities in between.
What we achieved
Peer network
Grew a cross-sector peer group who still stay connected, through meet-ups, networks and one-to-one support, promoting each other's work and building new collaborations.
Confidence
Participants came away more confident and self-aware, and better at speaking up while making space for others to be heard.
Back at work
People took the skills back into their work: more trust, better meetings, and more reflective, intentional ways of working.
New doors
For some it opened new doors, including the confidence to step into a new role.
Recommended
Almost everyone would recommend it. In their words, “working together works.”
Lasting resources
With and for participants, we created a set of lasting resources, including a bespoke reflective journal and a deck of coaching Cards for Equitable and Innovative Collaboration, which we hope to share in our Learning library soon.
What came next
The HCT Co-Lab sits within our Create Leaders pathway and growing alumni community, and connects to our Create Health work on fairer health across the county. It is shaping how we grow collaborative leadership for the system as a whole. Explore Create Leaders
In partnership with nowhere
The HCT Co-Lab was built on the Catalyst Chords curriculum, created with nowhere, and it draws on their collaborative leadership approach. Find out more about nowhere and their wider work.
Watch and read
Hear from people who took part in our Vox Pops, and see the images our artist in residence Lucy Turner made in response to the work, including ‘belonging’, ‘overcoming imposter syndrome’, ‘shifting paradigms’ and ‘constellations’.
Supported by
Get involved
For more about the HCT Co-Lab, email connect@creategloucestershire.co.uk