We promote and engage with people who have lived experiences that relate to our focus on changing the experience of vulnerable people.
Their perspectives and insights about their own experiences with services and systems are invaluable to how we design, deliver, review, and evaluate what we do. People with lived experience are directly involved with our work in different ways. In addition to guests at our building whose experiences are both current and historical, we also engage people with lived experience as employees and as consultants.
For example, the first Women’s Advocate employed by Embrace People & Place is a woman with lived experience. Another example is one of our first in-house partners. Family Inclusion Strategies in the Hunter (FISH) is staffed by parents with lived experiences of child removal, life with a child in care, and struggles with other child and family services. They are support workers and educators and clearly demonstrate the importance of inclusion and their potential as people who have successfully navigated complicated systems.
There are numerous benefits to actively including people with lived experience in our work. For example, empathy and understanding of guests’ circumstances, firsthand perspectives that lead to quality policies and practices, challenging stereotypes and biases about vulnerable people and their potential and promoting resilience and hope.
We also see people with lived experience as central to our approach to developing and educating organisations, workers, and volunteers. Their experiences provide important prompts for identifying learning needs and help to achieve the depth of learning that is required to reflect on and adjust values and biases that can get in the way of good practice.
Importantly, our commitment to lived experience and genuine co-design processes creates employment, education, and social connection opportunities for people with lived experience whom we work alongside.
