Heard of Lived Expertise?

But while everyone, who has lived something has an experience of it. Lived expertise comes from being able to decipher, reflect upon, interpret and understand how that experience can be communicated and positioned back to the very systems, people and processes that had an impact on that experience, either directly or indirectly.

Expertise is also about the ability to think broadly outside of the factors that surrounded your own personal experience, whilst still brining insight from that into how that experience is strengthened .

For so long I was ashamed of my 'lived experience'. I never spoke about it. I felt either it would be disregarded or take away from how I would respond to or be perceived in places where I worked and studied.

I had this complex about my experience not being valid or enough, so I went to uni to study Social Science (criminology), I could see the relevance of my insight into what I was learning. But equally was left with so many questions semester after semester, around why so many of the voices and stories of people I have lived with and grown up alongside are not centred in interpreting research and understanding how we navigate these systems. But still I didn't say too much about my own journey or experience, I already felt like I didn't fit in at uni and was scared i would just continue to isolate myself more and more. But I believed if I had a degree in this stuff it would validate my lived experience and perspective more.

When I got out of uni and started working in the community sector, i started to see the language around the value of lived experience used more and more. But as a professional now I was more and more nervous about the risk of my career progression or how i would be perceived personally if people started to know me as the homeless kid, the kid who's parents were addicts, who's sister was stolen and a state ward - who was in the daily telegraph for riding in stolen cars and street gangs as a teenager (i was around 21 when that article came out and cant find a copy of that article anywhere, but i know it exists in the archives somewhere).

So my career went from strength to strength, and it wasnt until I got to the point in my career where I was working along some of the most senior public servants on some of the most complex and sensitive of public projects that I started to step into owning who i was and where i had came from.

So this past year has been a realisation of building lived expertise as a super power. But with great power comes great responsibility. And the more and more I sit with thinking about it the more i believe that we are under selling the significance of this. Now when i hear livedexperience, i think that actually takes away from the validity of someones life experience. And yes, this is contextual.

But I want to see more and more people from community taking up space on panels and at conferences with the same level of agency and visability as those there with doctorates.

I sat with Barkaa aka Chloe Quayle this week as part of the Impact Policy podcast, she has around 10 years experience of the justice sector both as a child and an adult.

As an artist and musician she so easily and eloquently communicated some of the most significant systemic gaps we are trying to navigate in the reform of the out of home sector and justice, describing problems identified in recent research i saw presented by BJ Newton, PhD from 悉尼新南威尔士大学 at a recent reform workshop.

Could someone like Barkaa have been able to do this if perhaps, lets say had only one experience of the justice system. That experience is valid absolutely, im trying to be cautious here not to take anything away from anyone.

But what we are seeing is a general use of lived experience often from people outside of those worlds/communities when we know, there are people who have a significant, sustained and in depth understanding of those 'experiences' within this group of people.

We are calling for an elevation of this, and we believe that's 'Lived Expertise'.