Tree of lived experience collaboration example

This tree has been co-created by families with lived experience and staff at Emerging Minds.

Wisdom from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families will be in another tree in our garden.

Roots are our values

What values are important to us when staff and children, parents and caregivers with lived experience are working together?

• Children’s, human, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s rights
• Social justice and equity
• Diversity and inclusion
• Relational
• Respect, care and compassion with a full heart
• Empathy (not pity)
• Trust, honesty and transparency
• Authenticity, genuineness and integrity
• Safe enough and accountable spaces
• Honouring and responding to lived experience voices

Trunk is our attitudes

What attitudes do staff need to bring to this work?

• Shared values and principles at every level
• Valuing family members with lived experience as whole people and not their adversities
• Being willing to:
  • be open
  • show empathy
  • be curious
  • understand own biases and mental models
  • challenge conventional thinking
  • embrace complexity
  • be non-judgemental, and interrogate own assumptions and judgements
• Determination to deliver outcomes with people with lived experience
• Hopeful and realistic
• Believing this work is critical and purposeful
• Everyone deserves heir voice to be heard
• Pride in this work
• Promoting autonomy and agency without judgement or control
• Choice and agency
• Mutual recognition and understanding (two-way truth)
• Acknowledging and responding to power imbalances
• Seeing families and children as knowledgeable contributors using the Five practice shifts

Reflecting

• Being aware of power dynamics between staff and individuals with lived experience; finding ways to balance and share – in relationships, decision-making, knowledge development, and leadership.
• Being aware of power within lived experience spaces.
• Recognising:
  • our own privilege
  • that people with lived experience have skills
  • relationships and connections between staff and lived experience matter.
• Acknowledging our own biases.
• Being aware of the systems and processes that sit alongside the skills.
• Holding the outcomes in mind from the start (the process and the journey).
• Considering children’s and families’ whole experience of working with us and others (we might not be the only ones asking for their emotional labour).
• Putting yourself in the shoes of others – thinking beyond our need or want to capture information in the moment – seeing their experience as bigger than what we are.
• Holding your understanding of an individual’s whole and family experience and context front of mind.
• Understanding context matters – recognising historical truths.
• Knowing your own place within a story.

Engaging

• Valuing and using your own unique skills when working with lived experience.
• Learning how to hear and respond to children’s voices in appropriate and meaningful ways that have influence on outcomes.
• Being transparent, truthful and responding with integrity.
• Following through; doing what you say you will.
• Working to understand each other’s roles and positions.
• Connecting and building relationships with awareness; when connecting, sharing yourself without making it about you.
• Providing support that involves:
  • asking people what they need so they can participate
  • creating safe enough spaces
  • using trauma-informed approaches
  • creating environments where people feel empowered
  • responding to people with lived experience when spaces aren’t safe enough, and reflecting and learning together for next time
  • offering anonymity for children and families
  • supporting people with lived experience to share knowledge in a way that is safe for them
  • providing clear information ahead of time
  • balancing planning with flexibility
  • checking in before and after activities
  • closing the feedback loop and sharing next steps or opportunities.
• Being willing to give up the position of ‘knowledge holder’ and see knowledge as collective.
• Being ready to work with people who have diverse backgrounds, experiences, skills and knowledges.
• Providing choice and options around participation.
• Planning when to partner with lived experience partners on a project; deciding earlier in the project allows better opportunity for co-design than if the agenda is predetermined.
• Ensuring intentional, purposeful and meaningful engagements: families and children know what they are involved in and why.
• Showing through actions that you can be trusted and value lived experience wisdom as a knowledgeable, valid and useful source of evidence (alongside literature and professional knowledge).
• Facilitating remuneration and reimbursement.
• Inclusive practice by:
  • determining how to hear the voices of people less likely to engage with you
  • making space for all voices and thinking carefully about how to balance them.
• Active listening, holding space and allowing silence.
• Using validation skills – creating experiences where families and children feel valued and heard while collaborating with you.
• Taking time and being flexible – more value and meaning can be found when sitting with things longer.
• Recognising the (often invisible) emotional labour you are asking of people.
• Having structures in place to support safety, while balancing flexibility and allowing for emergence.
• Being able to adapt your approaches and timeframes to support the participation needs of people with lived experience.

Communicating

• Clearly communicating and using multiple methods of communication to support everyone’s styles and abilities.
• Summarising complex ideas and concepts.
• Being curious and digging deeper in responses from people with lived experience without causing offence or distress.
• Asking thoughtful questions while taking care to avoid voyeurism.
• Helping to identify and guide people to external opportunities, such as lived experience engagement projects or trainings run by other organisations.

Responding

• Knowing it is okay to make mistakes in this work – it is how we respond and learn from them that matters.
• Discovering actions that amplify the voices of children impacted by structural violence and oppression (allyship).
• Perspective taking; honouring individual experience while recognising there is a collection of experience to consider and bring together.
• Walking alongside as families and children unearth strengths and hopes in their stories
• Acknowledging outwardly through public recognition, showing gratitude and sharing the credit for what we co-produce.
• Taking care by:

• • being empathetic, while recognising it doesn’t give you someone’s experience – their experience is still their experience
  • holding the tension of hearing and valuing lived experience stories and what you think you need to do your work
  • using skills of responding to shame, blame and guilt – and holding that space
  • understanding that it can be people’s first time to express themselves in this way and to make sense of their journey (meaning making)
  • allowing time for reflection, despite our own agendas, and acknowledging some meetings may not go to plan
  • valuing the relationship, checking-in and feeding back
  • considering how to also look after yourself
  • holding the story and wrapping it back to the shared goal and agreed purpose.

Leaves are lived experience outcomes

How can this work be beneficial for the families and children involved?

• There is power in children and young people having a voice for their experiences, and in the way they are listened and responded to.
• Children and families are able to make meaning of their adversity that makes visible their skills and knowledge.
• Children and families are able to choose how they speak about and understand their stories.
• Creating a framework for children and young people to talk about their stories in a way that is helpful to them and their families now and into the future.
• Children are able to see their parents not as a struggling victim, but as someone who is active in creating positive change.
• Children seeing that from adversity they have grown into the people they are now.

• Children recognising their existing abilities and learning new skills that they can use to navigate other parts of life.
• Removing shame from our past.

• Offers permission to talk about the taboo, the tricky and the unsaid.
• Bravery and liberation from a sense of fear.
• An opportunity to reclaim dignity.
• Discovering healing, connection, belonging and solidarity.
• Finding peer connections and support.
• At every stage of involvement lived experience partnerships should foster feeling valued, recognised, heard, understood, empowered, included, fulfilled, respected and a sense of purpose.
• Opportunities to learn new information, skills and knowledge.
• Building membership and momentum in the lived experience movement across Australia.
• A sense of hope that things can be different.
• Improved confidence, self-worth and motivation and skills to create change.
• Understanding the importance of their stories.
• A valuable legacy; long lasting impact.
• Reciprocity – lived experience partnerships should also offer knowledge and skill development, plus guidance to external opportunities.
• The ability to step into other spaces to create structural change.
• The promotion of collective systems leadership.

Fruit is project outcomes

What project outcomes are possible?

• Change informed by the voices of children and families; authenticity in our sources of evidence
• Inspiring new ways of thinking and responding
• A workforce informed by lived experience and enhanced workforce skills
• Delivery of outcomes that families and children actually need and ask for
• High quality and authentic project and organisation outcomes add legitimacy, resonance, purpose and value to Emerging Minds’ work
• Workers better understand the families they work with, as well as their own families and themselves.
• Personal change that makes social outcomes more possible
• Lived experience voices are held, valued and honoured in our external work
• Motivating for staff and external audiences
• Sets an example of best practice
• Sustained connection to families and children
• Our relationships with lived experience partners influences systems and practitioner relationships
• Having a toolbag of skills to undertake the work results in strengths for all involved
• Intrinsic value, having undertaken this work based on the moral value of inclusion
• Instrumental value having enhanced the quality of outcomes through the work.