Lived experience, shared strength
Bringing lived experience into the heart of how services are designed, delivered, researched and evaluated
Increase your reach, impact and connection with the people you want to support
Loneliness, stigma and disconnection are among the hardest challenges in health and care, and many traditional interventions have struggled to shift them. Peer support is an approach that has been proven, again and again, to increase feelings of hope, connection and belonging.
“The relationship built with the peer researchers, and supporting us to strengthen our ability to work with peer researchers. As an organisation we have been upskilled, which is so invaluable. ”
What is Peer and Lived Experience work?
Peer support is people supporting one another through shared experience of health or social challenges, in paid or voluntary roles.
Lived experience work is wider. It includes peer support, and it reaches into peer research and evaluation, co-production, advisory groups, and leadership, with people who have direct experience helping to shape and direct services at every level.
Our starting point is that lived experience is expertise. We work beyond consultation and co-production, supporting people with lived experience to lead, so they are shaping and directing services, not only contributing to them.
How we can assist you
No matter what stage of a project life cycle your organisation is in, we can provide you with customised support that focuses on your organisation’s needs and requirements.
Examples:
Support to launch a programme or project involving peer workers, for any organisation type.
Quality assurance and evaluation of peer services and peer roles.
Recruiting, training and mentoring peer researchers to lead research and evaluation with the communities you serve.
Lived experience engagement and co-production, from community listening sessions to lived experience advisory groups.
Sustainability planning to increase peer staff retention and quality of service delivery.
Recruitment and hiring consultation, ensuring high quality peer workers.
Bespoke training designed with you to suit your organisation.
Peer and lived experience leadership
Lived experience should not stop at taking part. We support people with lived experience to lead, developing peer leaders, building their confidence and influence, and helping organisations share real power, so decisions are shaped and directed by the people services are for. This is some of the work we are known for, and it is where we see services change most.
Our peer leadership development draws on tools and approaches tested in real settings, and we connect leaders across countries through the International Peer Leadership Network, which we co-founded.
A recent example: University of Nottingham and Institute of Mental Health
With the University of Nottingham and its Institute of Mental Health, we produced and launched the first report from a Peer Research Academy, a Wellcome-funded project led by and with people with lived experience, drawing together the voices of peer researchers from across the world on what peer research needs to thrive. It puts peer researchers in the lead as the people shaping what the field itself should look like.
The benefits of high-quality peer support services for:
Meet the needs of disconnected communities.
Improve the sustainability of activities.
Increase capacity of community to help themselves.
Create meaningful employment and voluntary opportunities for the community served.
People supported by others who have been there, easing transitions in and out of services.
Peer roles set up and integrated well, so teams and peer workers both thrive.
Greater retention of peer workers, and clearer routes for them to progress.
Care and services shaped by the expertise of people who have used them.
Government
Build peer support into national and regional strategy.
Services shaped by the people who use them.
Evidence to guide investment and scaling.
Stronger trust with communities that services find hard to reach and who are underserved.
People
Hope, connection, and a sense of belonging
Confidence, skills, and recovery
Paid roles that value lived experience as expertise
Less self-stigma and greater self-esteem
More equal relationships
Knowledge and support from others who understand
“Although they helped us to successfully apply for significant funding, it is the personal and management support, peer leadership, co-development and mentoring, that has stood out most for me. The value of that in our new and developing project has been huge.”
As international experts in peer support programmes and lived experience work, we have significant experience supporting organisations to launch, develop, research and evaluate peer and lived experience approaches in the following sectors:
Addictions / substance use / harm reduction
Mental health (hospital/clinics/community)
Youth services
Human trafficking and sexual exploitation
Housing and homelessness
Violence against women and girls
Disability
Immigrants and refugees
LGBTQI+
Older people
Suicide prevention
Access to an International Network
Hundreds of peer workers, peer researchers and lived experience leaders are part of the Habitus network, including through the International Peer Leadership Network.
“Every story a peer shares is like sending a lifeboat out into the ocean
to all those people that are struggling in silence.
Peer support pulls them into the boat and helps
them realise that they are not alone.”
— Peer Leader