Leaders with Lived Experience: Breaking down Barriers
UnLtd finds, funds and supports social entrepreneurs - enterprising people with solutions that change our society for the better.
The National Lottery Community Fund gives grants to organisations in the UK to help improve their communities. The money awarded comes from the UK National Lottery.
Team:
Marion Brossard
Shaun Danquah
Stephen Bediako
Further Reading:
Blog (UnLtd) - Leaders with lived experience: A call for change
Report - Enabling leaders with lived experience, learning report
In 2017/18 The Social Innovation Partnership (TSIP) partnered with UnLtd on a new initiative, funded by the National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) to develop a new social leadership programme for those with lived experience.
This project follows research which highlights the need to close the gap between those who experience social issues and those working to solve them. The Leaders with Lived Experience (LLE) project was inspired and informed by research into the value of lived experience by Baljeet Sandhu, 2017 Yale World Fellow. Her report, The Value of Lived Experience in Social Change, identified the need for structural change within the social sector to ensure that people with real-life expertise have opportunities to lead and shape change.
During this project, TSIP and UnLtd worked directly with leaders with lived experience in Birmingham and Bristol to specify and categorise each of the systemic barriers they face; for example, the lack of access to equal and meaningful opportunities, conscious and unconscious bias around lived experience, lack of trust or a common language to discuss this challenge, etc. From there, we worked together to co-design meaningful solutions to tackling these barriers, whilst ensuring LLE remained at the centre of the design process.
The project has helped radically transform the practices of the organisations delivering this work through deepening our understanding of the structural, cultural and interpersonal barriers and enablers that we identified through delivering this work. It also led to NLCF developing a full Leaders with Lived experience programme which was piloted in 2019 and continued into 2020.
The key insights from this research and proposed recommendations were co-designed with the LLE and published in the report: Enabling leaders with lived experience, learning report
What did we learn?
Most importantly, we understood that both lived and learnt experience are valuable and needed, and not mutually exclusive. This initiative has brought together both and demonstrates the value of working in this way to break down systemic barriers in the sector.
We learnt how important it is to create real change by designing and working with LLE from the beginning to the end of a project and providing transparent communication throughout. We learnt it is important to be clear on your co-design goal but flexible about how you achieve it; allow time between phases to adapt and re-plan.
The quality of the insights and work LLE undertook during the workshops, including the action research, was outstanding. UnLtd also published a blog which explores the experience of participants on the programme. In addition, a visual report was co-produced with LLE to highlight some of their stories, learnings and expectations for the sector.
How have we used these learnings to drive change?
At TSIP, we are always learning/improving and continue to question the way we work. From our learnings in this project we have taken a new approach to recruitment, having understood the importance of having a combined team with lived and learn experience. As a result, TSIP are:
Changing the ways, they design and deliver projects, ensuring there are mixed teams of lived and learnt experience at the heart of their work- e.g. one of our largest projects now has a team which includes an LLE and someone with more traditional learnt experience.
Working with LLE and acting as a platform for them – i.e. employing them part-time, while they focus on their own entrepreneurial activities the rest of their time.
Placed LLE at the heart of events (e.g. not running design challenges, but training young black men to do so instead)
Building a new associate model specifically to work with people who have lived experience, to be brought on to different projects. Specifically, these insights have fed into building Community Research Models.
Dawn Austwick, Chief Executive of Big Lottery Fund, said: “People with first-hand experience of living with an issue are best-placed to identify and shape potential solutions, and this scheme is about unlocking their potential. Drawing on the wide pool of life experience and hands-on expertise currently going untapped in the UK, UnLtd and TSIP are taking an important step towards capturing this knowledge to ensure people’s deep understanding of the challenges they face is at the heart of making change happen.”