1. What is the EST, and who can participate?
The Expert Steering Team (EST) is a permanent part-time staff team of the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa. The EST consists of individuals with lived experience of homelessness, drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, ages, and communities. The EST works in system change through several pillars, including consultation, education, and directly engaging in system planning structures. During recruitment phases, any person who resides in the City of Ottawa and considers themselves a person with lived or living experience of homelessness is welcome to apply.
2. How is this work different from peer support?
Because lived experience work is a new and emerging field, there is still no broad consensus on terminology. This is often confusing, not just for people with lived experience trying to enter the field, but for organizations and individuals unsure of who to approach with opportunities.
When we engage people with lived experience at every level of practice, as is required for a rights- based approach, we’d expect to see people with lived experience in direct service spaces, program leadership spaces, and system-level planning spaces. For the purposes of this toolkit, “peer support” refers to direct service roles where people with lived experience of homelessness directly engage with other people with lived or living experience of homelessness, typically in a therapeutic setting. In contrast, the EST does not serve people in need of housing and homelessness services directly. The EST may serve organizations interested in program design or evaluation, governments interested in developing policy, researchers interested in community-led work, etc.
3. Where does the EST find funding?
Lack of funding is consistently identified as one of the top barriers to implementing lived experience leadership. It is true that ethical engagement can be pricey. People need to be compensated fairly, but organizations also need to invest time and resources into the management of the team. The Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa has always seen the EST as a key priority for our budget, and as such, the majority of the EST’s funding comes from the Alliance’s operational budget. The EST also self- funds and contributes to the broader organizational pot through a combination of grant funding and fee for service offerings (i.e. consultations, and educational resources).
4. What professional development or training opportunities are available for lived experts?
Staff with lived experience of homelessness are just that – staff! We do not make the assumption that team members all need the same professional development support, or even that every team member would be interested in treating the role as a professional development tool. The EST is not a skill building opportunity, it is a collective of people with strong established skills who are always practicing and refining their capabilities. People with lived experience are diverse, and we do not prescribe any one path. However, support and ongoing training needs are assessed on an ongoing basis. Training has ranged from informal skill sharing between staff, to group attendance of community workshops, to circulating opportunities for courses that may interest team members.
5. How does the Alliance prevent tokenism when engaging people with lived experience?
We use many techniques to prevent tokenism, many of which are addressed within this toolkit. The Alliance makes every effort to walk the walk. Team members see people with lived experience embedded in every level of the organization, including management and the board of directors. The EST reliably points to their strong connection to the broader Alliance team as a key protective element against tokenism in the workplace. It’s also important for us to be transparent – we have made mistakes, and we have had staff report feeling tokenized. The reality of interpersonal work of this nature is that the process of “getting it right” will always be iterative. Because of our investments in relationship building, staff are often comfortable disclosing feelings of tokenism, which gives us the opportunity to quickly move to solution-building, mitigating harms, building preventative practices for next time, and critically — saying “I’m sorry” when an “I’m sorry” is due.
6. How are people with lived experience compensated, and how is lived experience recognized?
While there are many perspectives on what appropriate recognition of lived experience looks like, we approach it as a recognition of expertise regardless of its origin. Equivalent lived or professional experience is written into the criteria for all job descriptions, and seats for people with lived experience are held on the board but the necessity of dedicated lived experience spaces is also recognized.
Similarly, our compensation model prioritizes equity between employees. You can read more about our compensation strategy in this toolkit.
7. How do you ensure psychological safety and prevent burnout?
There is a degree of vulnerability inherent to any work so closely associated with your personal experiences. Our team focuses on our collective system level expertise versus individual experiences, and holds a firm policy around not requesting personal details or stories. In the same way that staff members with a university degree are not required to bring citations to back up their professional recommendations, the EST are not required to back up their recommendations with personal stories. Despite our stance on storytelling, we recognize that there is no topic in housing and homelessness that does not pose the potential for connection to past traumas. We invest heavily in preparation and debrief processes, and ensure every team member has access to a point person for support as needed.
While the integration of lived expertise into our work environment gave us the push we needed to critically consider workplace safety, we believe strongly that all staff should benefit from strong health and safety policies and an atmosphere of support and accommodation. No workplace can or should assume the support needs of each of their staff. Our sector has long been built around rigidly siloed identities, and this has hurt people. No one person’s identity is solely that of a leader, a worker, a peer, or a client. The reality is that every organization is made up of people, each with complex needs and each with the ability to give and receive support. EST members, like all Alliance staff, are strongly encouraged to approach their supervisor to discuss support needs. Checking in on the emotional, physical, and mental wellbeing of staff members (and the subsequent offering of reasonable accommodations and interpersonal support) is a critical part of the management strategy required of all supervisory staff.
8. How can people with lived experience grow in their careers beyond lived experience roles?
It’s a common misconception that lived experience roles are skill building or career development tools. Lived experience roles are professional roles, and should not come with the expectation that they will be used as a stepping stone. Each member has a different goal for their career, and the Alliance supports team members in pursuing that goal. The Alliance does accept applications from EST members when non-lived experience roles open up within the organization, and often connects team members to opportunities in the community for employment in their areas of expertise. EST members are all encouraged to direct the overall amount of work they do for the Alliance, with some members working very casual hours, others regularly reaching 20 hour work weeks, and still more accepting fixed term full time work. The EST strongly endorses a model wherein the hours and scope of work can vary according to availability and interest.
9. How does the Alliance involve people with lived experience in project planning and decision-making?
The EST has a strong role in the management of their own work. The EST, wherever possible, is brought in very early to co-design Alliance initiatives. For this toolkit, for example, the EST co-wrote the proposal, wrote the table of contents, edited the work plan, and approved the final content. Part of modeling the values we recommend means leaning on lived experience leadership in our own work.
On the rare occasions where the EST does not agree with Alliance leadership, differences of opinions are handled through open conversation. Sometimes including dialogues with the Executive Director.
10. How can people with lived experience balance safely sharing their stories while respecting their boundaries and the boundaries of others at the table?
Storytelling is not a common practice of the EST. Yes, it is perfectly appropriate to share some of our personal lives in a work environment, but the historic centering of traumas in lived experience work has led to unintended harms.
The EST focusses on systems change work, and while stories can be powerful, in this work they can be used in ways that reduce people to just their trauma. Furthermore, stories might unintentionally shift the conversation away from the broader systemic issues. The goal is to not give people an excuse to feel emotionally moved but then do nothing. The EST draws from lived experience without sharing personal stories, which shifts the focus from “what happened to me” to “what I’ve observed, learned, and know from experience.” It’s about identifying patterns, root causes, and solutions based on what people in similar situations have encountered rather than the details of one person’s life. We lead with our expertise, not our stories.
11. What advice do you have for organizations or researchers working with people with lived experience?
Organizations and researchers would benefit from a review of the toolkit to examine strategies for ethical engagement, particularly in the area of avoiding tokenism. We strongly encourage interested parties to choose one pathway to engagement; either building the pathways necessary to engage people with lived experience effectively and ethically, or contracting an established team.
12. How does the Alliance handle ethical or boundary issues (e.g., substance use, dual roles)?
Despite its position as one of our top frequently asked questions, we have not encountered significant challenges related to common ethical pitfalls. Our team came together with great intentionality, a collaborative process, and open communication channels, and these factors have largely guarded us against potential fall out. Like all staff members, the EST signs a contract at hiring that covers conflict of interest, confidentiality, and outlines a code of conduct that applies equally to all staff. Like all staff, the EST must hold to the terms of this contract to protect their employment.
The EST has also had frank discussions about the often loaded implications of these questions
— particularly those surrounding substance use. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of stigma at the root of these concerns, even among the most well intentioned supporters. People with lived experience are, like all people, complex individuals with rich histories and unique needs. Contrary to the typical expectations, we find that staff with lived experience are often more likely than their non-lived expert peers to build cultures of support, open communication, and boundary setting related to substance use. This is equally true for other potentially “taboo” ethical challenges that are rarely discussed among non lived experience teams. People with lived experience working in the social sector are, virtually by definition, experts on balancing personal needs, complex histories, and professionalism.
The EST has held consultations with community partners interested in discussing compassionate professional substance use boundaries, and their guidance has remained consistent. Organizations that ascribe to evidence based beliefs around substance use as a health issue rather than a personal failing must model this belief in their HR policies. This does not mean a lack of expectations, but rather clarity of expectations. A zero tolerance policy may not only disqualify an otherwise qualified staff member, but also fails to get to the root of the policy’s intent. If your organization is concerned a staff member under the influence may behave inappropriately or fail to perform adequately at work, the inappropriate behaviour and poor performance are the issues that must be named. Workplace cultural norms should support the expression of protective interpersonal boundaries (i.e. staff members who prefer to avoid events that serve alcohol should be free to set this boundary). We recommend the use of a comprehensive, and person centred HR manual that includes both staff with and without lived experience.
13. How can people with lived experience influence policies and practices in the sector?
“Nothing about us without us” isn’t a catch phrase, it’s a promise. To make change and influence the systems we work with, we need to be in the room. Much of the role of the supporting organization is to build sector buy-in and be very clear that meaningful engagement is not optional. Work that does not include lived expertise simply is not as effective. We’ve seen countless examples of the EST catching seemingly obvious flaws in policies and programs that otherwise could have caused costly unintended consequences. Once it becomes clear to a community that inclusion cannot be skipped over, it’s simply a matter of ensuring the right voices are at every table, and every table is equipped to truly hear them. We bring new opportunities for sector collaboration to the EST and have open discussions on which members would be best suited to work on the project in question. We also approach new collaborators with the option to join us for a training on ethical engagement, to ensure all parties are aware of why people with lived experience are included and must continue to be included.