Lived Experience Is Expertise

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The Lived Experience Leadership Institute (LELI) is redesigning how public policy is made—by embedding people most impacted by poverty, disability, systemic racism, and homelessness directly into government decision-making. 

Created in partnership with CivicMakers, Ridiculously Hopeful Futures in California is a bold initiative to build structures where community members and policymakers co-imagine and co-design solutions together.

Too often, policies are created about communities without being designed with them. LELI changes that by equipping lived-experience leaders with the tools, compensation, and support to shape real policy and program decisions.

LELI (Lived Experienc Leadership Institute) trains people with lived experience to become researchers, advocates, and co-designers of public policy. We build the infrastructure that allows community expertise to shape decisions at the scale and speed government requires—without losing humanity, nuance, or power.

Our work is grounded in community-defined research, AI-enabled skill building, and co-design with public institutions, ensuring policies work in the real world because they are built with the people most impacted.

LELI fellows bring lived experience into the policy spaces where gaps are most costly and change is most urgent, including:

• Housing & Homelessness Prevention
• Income, Workforce, and Economic Security
• Health, Disability, and Behavioral Health
• Criminal Legal System & Re-Entry
• Child Welfare & Foster Care Transitions
• Aging & Fixed-Income Security
• Immigration & Mixed-Status Families
• Education, Youth Disconnection, & Transitions to Adulthood
• Family Stability, Caregiving, and Childcare
• Racialized Poverty and Structural Inequity
• Rural & Disinvested Communities
• Digital Access & AI-Driven Systems

LELI is built to scale across institutions, geographies, and policy cycles while staying rooted in lived reality.

Our model scales into:

• Training cohorts that prepare community members for policy, research, and advocacy roles
• Community-led research teams embedded in county and state processes
• Policy design and advisory tables that close equity gaps before policies launch
• Cross-sector partnerships spanning government, philanthropy, and community organizations
• Narrative and storytelling infrastructure that shifts public understanding and political will
• AI-enabled tools that multiply community capacity without replacing human judgment

 Policies that are:

• More holistic
• More durable
• More equitable
• And far less likely to fail the people they are meant to serve
   

Because when lived experience is treated as expertise, systems finally start to work.