Lived Experience Leadership Initiative

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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. Too often, policies are created about communities without being designed with them. Our work closes that gap.

LELI is part of Ridiculously Hopeful Futures in California, created in partnership with CivicMakers—a bold effort to build structures where community members and policymakers co-imagine and co-design solutions together.

Dalbert Design transforms lived experience into systems-level solutions that improve policy outcomes.

Across our projects, we:

• Train people with lived experience to become researchers, advocates, and co-designers of public policy
• Build infrastructure that allows community expertise to shape decisions at the scale and speed government requires
• Ground our work in community-defined research, AI-enabled skill building, and co-design with public institutions
• Ensure participation is supported, compensated, and non-extractive

Our work brings lived experience into 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

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

It 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 tables that close equity gaps before programs launch
• Cross-sector partnerships across government, philanthropy, and community organizations
• Narrative and storytelling infrastructure that builds 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 work better.