This workshop empowers participants to understand the importance of meaningfully integrating lived expertise into their organizations, services, and communities.

Drawing from knowledge and experience with systems, challenges, and barriers, this session explores how lived expertise can drive authentic change and create more equitable and responsive ways of proceeding in our work.

LET’S is unique in that all our staff, researchers, and educators are of the identities of the project we are doing (i.e. 2SLGBTQIA+ workshop facilitator is queer, accessibility auditor is disabled, etc.). For 20 years, LET’S that has been utilizing the personal experiences, stories, and lived/living expertise of our staff. We have also been entrusted with sharing the lived expertise of our members, an honour we don’t take lightly.

At LET’S, we share our stories to bring perspective to the educational opportunities we facilitate. Our speaking authentically and openly encourages others to find ways to share their stories and create more space to hear and contemplate stories from others.

It is vital to honour people’s stories and their opening themselves up to be vulnerable and relive emotional experiences. Hearing a person’s story comes with responsibility, whether personal contemplation and/or assessing how it can be applied to our environments (work, volunteering, family, friends, community, religious institutions, hobbies, activism, etc.).

Clients and workshop participants say that the stories we share give them more context and connection and make the material more memorable.

Our voices combined leads to transformational change in our communities, workplaces, and interpersonal relationships

Learning objectives include:
·      Understanding the difference between lived/living experience versus lived/living expertise
·      Creating authentic, ongoing relationships with people with lived/living expertise
·      How to move beyond the tokenistic consultation model
·      Learn how to create braves spaces that recognize people’s varying experiences in life
·      Understand the value and importance of lived/living expertise in creating more effective, equitable services and policies
·      Address barriers that prevent meaningful participation and implement enablers that support genuine sharing
·      How to address power dynamics and build trust