How Does Lived Experience Contribute to Startup Success?
These insights have been compiled and written by Ellie Broad, Community & Events Executive at the Venture Studio from Crisis.
Every month, the Venture Studio from Crisis team host our Entrepreneurship Forum event for our members, colleagues, and volunteers. We invite founders and business leaders to shed light on their journey into entrepreneurship, helping to demystify what it means to be an entrepreneur, to inspire a culture of innovation within Crisis, and helping us to think about how we can achieve our mission to end homelessness in new ways whilst looking through the lens of entrepreneurship.
Recently, we were grateful to be joined by four speakers who are building purposeful solutions to tackle social injustices:
- Rob Curtis, co-founder and CEO of Daylight, the first and only digital banking platform in the U.S. specifically designed for and by the LGBT+ community.
- Sophie Maxwell, who received a Changing Lives grant from Crisis to help establish The Really NEET Project back in 2010. Sophie founded an award-winning South Yorkshire based Social Enterprise working with some of society’s most vulnerable young people.
- Alice Adams, Co-Founder and Director of Power With, alongside Caroline Hadley, an expert with lived experience. Power With supports organisations and experts by experience to come together and create effective solutions to homelessness.
The work that is being pioneered by all our speakers is helping to create a world where we recognise the diversity of people’s strengths and help them to harness these into something powerful, because the current system is missing out on an abundance of talent.
“If you’re going to make a change in the system that already exists, you need to support the trailblazers from non-traditional paths to entrepreneurship. You need to shine a light and support those who are breaking down a wall that has never been broken down before”. — Rob Curtis, Co-Founder of Daylight
During the session, we were particularly interested to find out more about how their lived experience has contributed to the success of their startup. Here’s a brief recap of what we discussed and our key learnings.
What do we mean by ‘lived experience’?
Everyone has experience of living. But when we say, ‘lived experience’, we’re referring to a particular kind of experience — the experience of homelessness, addiction, prison leavers, mental health, care leavers, and much more.
It’s also important to remember that many of these experiences are often interconnected — in part because our experiences and identities themselves are intersectional.
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives” Audre Lorde
For example, people leaving prison are also at high risk of homelessness. This is for several reasons, they may have been homeless before entering prison, are dependent on drugs or alcohol or simply are unable to get support finding the right sort of accommodation on release. The impact of this has been exacerbated by the pandemic, as more than 1,000 prisoners were released into homelessness at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in England and Wales.
How do we build with, not for?
We know that diversity of all kinds is lacking in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. We also know that those with learned knowledge of social inequalities continue to dominate social sector thinking. Although this ‘learned experience’ is one route to meaningful social change, lived experience — the direct personal experience of a social issue or injustice — can be a powerful starting place.
So, a key focus of the conversation with our panelists was around understanding how we can make sure that the door is open for everybody that needs to come through it. And specifically, how can we ensure that as a society we value people’s lived experiences in a meaningful way?
- It doesn’t come for free
When you are involving people with lived experience, you have to think about who is benefitting from the process. Why are you involving people with lived experience? Is what you’re doing coproduction or consultation? Will these people be listened to and be heard? — Alice Adams, Power With
Involvement is when someone is being asked to draw upon their lived experience in order to input into the design of something. In this case, think about what kind of remuneration can be offered. To decide the rate for involvement activities, research and speak with consultants with expertise in other settings to understand what they would receive; acknowledging that people with lived experience of homelessness are experts, with valuable insight. In addition, how you remunerate will be influenced by the individual circumstances of each individual, with regards to any benefits or state support they may be receiving. In some cases, people may not be able to receive cash and therefore you may be able to offer vouchers from a choice of popular retailers instead. When collaborating with lived experience experts, ensure that people feel informed and have agency about what they can receive, without affecting any benefits they may currently be a recipient of.
2. Invest in your company culture — build a support system that enables people to show up
When involving leaders with lived experience, you must ensure that you are facilitating a space of true inclusion, which means not just inviting someone to be present, but also ensuring their perspective is heard and taken into account in the final decision.
Rob shared with us his experience of hiding his identity whilst working in corporate jobs because he felt that he couldn’t show up as his whole authentic self. He then went on to build startups that support healthier and more sustainable financial lives for the LGBTQ+ community.
He noted that it can sometimes be traumatic to bring your full self to work. You need to build and invest in a support system within your organization that enables people to show up, but that doesn’t risk retraumatizing people. You must deal with that in the workplace by building the right culture and policies around how to support people to come to work as their whole authentic selves. This involves building a culture of vulnerability. When creating this environment for people to thrive, you have to understand the risks that come with it and mitigate these through various mechanisms, such as peer support, professional support, allyship, leading by example, and more.
3. Be an ally
An ally is any person that actively promotes and aspires to advance the culture of inclusion through intentional, positive, and conscious efforts that benefit people as a whole. Allyship matters because the burden of advocacy cannot fall on the shoulders of those who have lived experience of an issue alone, as that can be exhausting and overwhelming.
4. Do the work: Connect with those who are ‘LinkedOut’ of opportunities
We know that opportunities are unevenly distributed for individuals with lived experience. We also know that the ‘cult of the warm introduction’ continues to dominate the startup and investor ecosystem, as “founders that are introduced to investors by friends, school friends and colleagues are thirteen times more likely to receive investment, compared to an entrepreneur who doesn’t move in rarefied circles”.
So how can we connect with these individuals who are ‘LinkedOut of opportunities?’ Caroline, an expert with lived experience at Power With, recommended that we need to make the effort to advertise opportunities in different places. Moving beyond just LinkedIn and more obvious job boards, but looking in non-traditional places and perhaps even non-digital places such as hosting pop-up stores in towns outside of London. It’s important to be present where people are.
What’s next?
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-traumatizing for some. But, for those who want to convert their own experience into powerful leadership for social change, here are some resources that may be useful for you:
- Working-class leadership opportunities with 2027
- Lived Experience Fellowship with Year Here
- Lending your voice to aging research with VOICE
- Changing Lives Grant programme for those experiencing homelessness — contact us at venture.studio@crisis.org.uk
For practitioners wanting to learn more:
