Lived Experience Leadership
We’re launching two new bursaries to empower experts by experience to become social entrepreneurs.
Year Here was founded upon the belief that solving social problems starts with understanding them. It’s such a simple statement, it’s almost a truism. But too often, society is shaped by people who do not have a profound understanding of the social injustices they aim to tackle, nor a deep appreciation of the reality of the other people’s lives that they impact. One only has to look to our politicians to see how disconnected our leaders can be from the reality experienced by ordinary people.
Policy-making, public services, charity projects or social entrepreneurship that are led by assumption or guesswork are far less likely to be effective than those that start with real, human-level, insight.
Because we saw such a dearth of insight-led innovation in the social sector, we knew that frontline service had to be at the heart of the Year Here experience. Over five months, our Fellows contribute in frontline public and social services. They get alongside people and work with them as equals. They listen and learn before seeking to act.
But this ‘learned experience’ is but one route to meaningful social change. Lived experience — the direct personal experience of a social issue or injustice— can be a powerful starting place for authentic social change too.
But there are questions about whether we value lived experience as much as we do impressive-sounding employment histories or qualifications from elite institutions.
That’s why we’re launching two new lived experience bursaries for our 2021 programme: one for those with experience of the criminal justice system and one for those with experience of life shocks — sudden, unwanted and unexpected events that hurt our financial stability and life chances.
At Year Here, we’ve seen some great examples of lived experience leadership. Before joining Year Here, Krishani Ranjan had balanced caring responsibilities with a corporate career. During the programme, she deepened her understanding through her placement at Camden Carers. Drawing inspiration from all these experiences, she founded Curo Carers to support the 1 in 7 employees who also care for a loved one. As mother to a disabled son and with a background in the arts, Aviva Leeman knew how rare it was to find genuinely inclusive spaces in the arts and culture sector — so she founded Everybody. And Mursal Hedayat was inspired to launch her venture Chatterbox, a refugee-powered language learning service, after seeing her mother struggle to convert her civil engineering qualifications into a career when she came to the UK as a refugee from Afghanistan.
The history of social justice movements is filled with changemakers whose passion and inspiration was rooted in their own personal experience — from civil rights leaders to the founders of the first women’s refuges.
But today, in the modern social sector, leaders with lived experience are too often overlooked and underrepresented.
“Lived experience leaders have limited visibility and little access to opportunity, resource and support to shape or lead population and systems-level change.
Instead, technical expertise and learned knowledge continue to dominate social sector thinking, behaviour and activities”
Baljeet Sandhu — Rebooting the DNA of Leadership
For a whole raft of reasons — from educational inequality to simple financial barriers — people from low income backgrounds are less likely to be represented in positions of power. And the same is true when it comes to the social impact sector.
“We run the absurd risk that — as a field that’s all about social justice — we are deepening structural inequality with our employment practices while trying to dismantle it through our day-to-day work.”
Jack Graham — You don’t have to be rich to do good, but it helps
The renewed prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement through 2020 and the ongoing activism of groups like Charity So White and Social Enterprise So White have brought issues of representation to the fore too. Black people, in particular, are chronically underrepresented in positions of power. In 2020, Operation Black Vote found that just 17 of Britain’s most powerful 1000 people are Black.
A lack of social mobility, underrepresentation and the absence of meaningful support for lived experience leaders are all interconnected problems — in part because our experiences and identities are themselves intersectional. In the words of Audre Lorde, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives”
Not everyone with lived experience of a social issue or of inequality will want to use their experiences to help other people or dismantle unjust systems — and that’s OK. Operating in that space might be too emotionally burdensome or even re-traumatising for some. But many will be able to convert their own experience into powerful leadership for social change. That can only be a reality for a new generation of social entrepreneurs if the social sector is set up to identify and nurture the potential of leaders with lived experience.
At Year Here we’ve focussed much of our energy over the past 8 years on changing how people lead social change. Now, with these lived experience leadership bursaries, we hope to be even bolder about changing who gets to lead change.
