The National Social Mission Department Lived Experience and Participation Resource
Matrix of engagement and participation
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There are five key ways for people with lived expertise to participate:
Inform
The sharing of information to assist people: • Understand how services/programs/activities work • Make informed decisions • Be aware of available options Examples include newsletters, leaflets, brochures, induction booklets and sessions, websites and social media.
Consult
Asking for feedback (compliments, complaints and suggestions) on service delivery, programs and activities, and policy and advocacy objectives. Examples include compliments, complaints and suggestions mechanisms, surveys, questionnaires, suggestion boxes, exit interviews, focus groups and social media.
Involve
Working together with people to ensure understanding of lived experience (concerns and aspirations) and using this understanding to inform change and improvement. This includes use of this understanding in: • • • • • • •
Decision making Policy making Research projects Fundraising Public relations campaigns Media engagement Social policy development
Examples include forums, peer education, peer mentoring, advisory groups.
Collaborate
Advice is sought from participants and stakeholders and the workforce and this advice is fundamental to planning and decision-making processes. There is a shared agreement for action taken. Examples include person centred case management, participant and other stakeholder advocacy and participation in project co-design and involvement in recruitment.
Empower
The transferring of ownership of outcomes or decision making to empower the client, participant, beneficiary and other stakeholders.
Participation in policy design and advocacy The Salvation Army undertakes a systems-based approach to social problems. This means we work directly with impacted individuals to provide support and advocacy while also working at the systems level to address the root causes of disadvantage. It is therefore important that people with lived experience have a voice in the positions The Salvation Army takes for policy reform, advocacy and social justice initiatives, and have meaningful opportunities to directly influence policy makers. There are a range of benefits to facilitating such opportunities, including: 1. Enabling people with lived experience to transform personal challenges into positive outcomes for both themselves and potentially others who are experiencing the same or similar challenges 2. Improving policy and practice responses to various social problems by ensuring they are informed by those most directly impacted 3. Prompting desired action by humanising social problems that might otherwise be very abstract or difficult for others to understand2 4. An informed advocacy strategy to drive action for structural and systemic change.
Participation in mission development The Salvation Army is committed to expanding opportunities for participants to inform our policy design and advocacy work. The following initial opportunities will be available until more formal mechanisms, such as the Freedom Advocates program, are in place: 1. Planned and supported participant consultation to review a series of one to two page policy briefs across relevant service streams 2. Coordinated development of case studies and quotes from participants that demonstrate and speak to key policy failures, and provide evidence for Salvation Army policy recommendations across service streams and hot topics (i.e. cashless debit card, forced marriage, etc.) 3. Ad hoc participant consultation on emerging/urgent issues on which we have not previously consulted 4. Alternatively, or additionally, policy-related questions may be included in the annual Participant and Carer Survey to help capture views on issues that have not been included in other formal consultation mechanisms 5. Supported participation to make direct submissions to government and to appear before Parliamentary inquiries where participants may share their experiences (This can be done “in camera” or privately, where the evidence is not made public on the Hansard) To minimise the risk of consultation fatigue, The Salvation Army will endeavour to integrate these opportunities into existing consultation resources, such as Stream and National Participation Reference Groups and working groups (discussed below). It is likely that a special, pilot working group will be established to support a small number of participants interested in policy and advocacy work. This is to ensure there is appropriate support for participants to make informed decisions about their involvement and to have positive experiences when sharing their stories and recommendations. Through this group, participants will be able to shape the formal mechanism, inform a monitoring and evaluation resource for that mechanism, and identify other methods of engaging in policy and advocacy work.
Examples include participant and other stakeholder led projects, involvement in organisation governance, and direct engagement in policy advocacy, such as submissionwriting and providing evidence to parliamentary inquiries
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1 TSA Lived Experience and Participation Policy GO_QA_POL_TCSP_V1-0, pg.6
2 Zak P. J. (2015). Why inspiring stories make us react: the neuroscience of narrative. Cerebrum : the Dana forum on brain science, 2015, 2.
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