Bringing the lived experience of homelessness into city-making

People with a lived experience of homelessness make great advocates for change and arguably hold a range of knowledge and ideas about what is needed to improve our cities. But when places, services, programs and policies are made, rarely are the people most impacted by these processes approached or included in decision making.

In order to better understand what transformations occur when we incorporate lived experiences of homelessness into policy and practice, I interviewed Sharon McDonald, Lived Experience Coordinator at Launch Housing, Peer-worker Spike Chippalone of Need to Know Homeless, and Meg Mundell, editor of We Are Here: Stories of Home, Place and Belonging - a collection of true stories written by people who have experienced homelessness.

What is lived experience participation?

Lived experience participation refers to the variety of ways that people with a lived experience can participate and contribute to policy making, service design and delivery. It does not only pertain to homelessness; it is about human rights and the role of organisations, policy-makers and city-shapers to ensure that our cities represent those who live in them.

After years of activism and self-organisation by people with a lived experience, evidence is building that illustrates how peer-led discussions promote positive outcomes for both participants and organisations. Incorporating lived experience into policy and practice is still, however, an emerging area, despite evidence demonstrating the range of positive benefits that incorporating such perspectives can have on service design and evaluation [1].

There are various ways that people with a lived experience can participate such as: co-designing policies and organisational strategies, creating and implementing satisfaction surveys, engaging in one-on-one peer support work and peer-led programs, participating in reference and working groups, creating experience-led training for staff, or acting in an advisory role on committees and groups [2].

For participation to work, organisations must value the specialised knowledge of people who hold personal experiences of homelessness in the same way as they would others. In this way, viewing a person with lived experience as ‘the expert’ puts human rights into action as it allows someone’s personal experience to influence the way policies and services are designed, delivered and evaluated [3].

What is a lived experience of homelessness?

While working in the housing and homelessness sector, I’ve learnt how people with a lived experience of homelessness hold diverse identities and histories, despite many of the structural issues being similar (i.e. a lack of social housing).

These people know what it’s like to feel invisible, unwanted, criminalised, excluded, targeted, profiled, policed, problematised, and prohibited by policies and systems.

Incremental changes to the form of our cities don’t go unnoticed. Like how bench seats used for sitting and sleeping either become shorter or disappear altogether, while alcoves are blocked by flower pots or bolsters, making way for “public amenity and access” for everyone but people experiencing homelessness.

People experiencing homelessness are resilient, creative, analytical and resourceful as they find their own sense of place and solutions to the complex socio-spatial manifestations of wider economic, political, social and cultural problems. Because they have to be in order to survive.

Understanding homelessness, housing and home

Peer worker, Spike Chiappalone, tells me that while it’s important for policy makers to tackle housing affordability and recognise it as an issue, we also need to understand that homelessness often intersects with other challenging life circumstances:

“Homelessness doesn’t just happen to anyone. Homelessness happens to people because of inequalities, the challenges people face in their lives and the system deficits that lead to these challenges. It can be really difficult for people to know what it’s like to be without economic support, intact families, or have low self-esteem. Be in and out of incarceration, have a failed marriage, suffer from chronic illnesses, be on a protection visa, institutionalised, discriminated against, experienced family violence, sexually assaulted, live in a supported residential service, or been through the boy’s homes. When you're experiencing homelessness, it can be hard to maintain relationships, keep your belongings and keep yourself safe. Mining magnates or people who own ten houses and are negative-gearing never become 'the homeless'.”

The experiences captured in We Are Here: Stories of Home, Place and Belonging [4] further illustrate Spike’s point by giving voice to the range of meanings people attach to ‘place’ and ‘home’ regardless of having or not-having a secure tenure. For Rachel Kurzyp, “A home isn’t just where you are, but also who you are”. While for Rod, who travelled a lot, home was about finding community, about belonging to somewhere, someone or something - a landscape..

When I asked the editor of the book, Meg Mundell, what the concept of home meant for the writers, she said:

“Home meant many different things. For Greg, home was people. For Jo, it was the kitchen table where people came together to share meals. For Debi, home was a place of ambivalent feelings. Several people had experienced abuse or family violence which made home a really fraught place - subject to upheaval, severed, damaged, or put into jeopardy. Home is not always a good place, it can be idealised, and for a lot of people that reality doesn’t match. So they have to start again and rebuild a home from scratch.”

So how can plans and policies better include the voices of people with a lived experience of homelessness rather than viewing this group as a problem to be solved?

Language Matters

The way we talk about people matters. People experiencing homelessness are often feared and viewed as ‘hard to reach’ or ‘vulnerable’, preventing organisations from engaging people with a lived experience of homelessness in policy making and service delivery thereby rendering their experiences invisible.

Sharon McDonald, Lived Experience Coordinator at Launch Housing, argues that "People are not hard to reach, rather it's that we're not addressing the barriers or making the effort to hear from them".

Meg supported this argument:

“Any group is hard to reach if you start out with the idea that they’re hard to reach. This idea of the ‘hard to reach’ and the reluctance to engage people, comes back to misconceptions and stereotypes. The assumptions that people are broken if they have experienced homelessness is wrong both factually and morally. While we must be aware that people who have been or are going through homelessness are likely to have experienced some kind of trauma, we need to recognise that all of us can be vulnerable, and lumping people together into this ‘vulnerable’ group as if they’re in a special category of person who needs to be treated with cotton wool, is quite dis-empowering and takes away people’s agency, as if other people are best placed to make decisions for them.”

For Spike, an awareness and cautiousness around how media organisations who profit from messages that suggest that homeless people are all mentally ill or drug affected needs to be challenged and unlearned because “It’s not true. People sleeping rough have always been part of our community and should be extended the rights and dignity of any member of the community”.

Incorporating lived experience into policy and practice

Incorporating lived experience into policy and practice requires careful consideration, planning and commitment from organisations. As Sharon describes:

“Organisations need to do a lot of planning to ensure things are in place to make people feel safe - to avoid tokenism and causing harm. For it to work, there needs to be a shared purpose for both the organisation and the participant/s, and a willingness for leaders to share and/or relinquish power, which requires a cultural shift. If you are asking people for their lived expertise, you have to be prepared to act on it, and make changes. There is a real burden on people with a lived experience to do the heavy lifting in advocacy, education and fundraising - it can be like running back into the fire you’ve escaped.”

Meg highlighted the need to give people with a lived experience the chance to give honest feedback and for organisations to be willing to take this on:

“Organisations often have control over their employees and how they behave, But when people with a lived experience are asked to give their opinion, people get worried because they might highlight flaws in how things are being done or say something unexpected. Well, too bad. We’ve got to let people speak. There’s no need to be afraid or censorious. Make workplace adjustments. Offer some training and provide a briefing for both staff/peers. “These are some of the things you might like to talk about…”, but don’t control what they want to say. Give people credit for having their own intelligence and their own perspective. If they have some criticism, then listen to it.”

Spike and Sharon, both emphasise the need for organisations to provide adequate support: “Psychological safety is absolutely paramount, so access to counselling, supervision and mentorship is essential. There are costs to providing the necessary support and training, as well as the budget to properly remunerate people with lived experience for their time and expertise.” (Sharon).

“Negotiating boundaries can be really tricky. The peer role does not come with a handbook when you begin and different peers use their lived experience in ways that suit them and the communities they support. This is why peer workers need the support and supervision of their colleagues and managers in the workplace, so then they can make a real go of it!” (Spike)

The benefits, for Sharon, are clear:

“When you see what happens for people when their ideas are being heard, and can lead to positive change for themselves and others, they absolutely flourish. And that’s my hope for anyone we work with. Consumer participation has benefits for the participant and the organisation, but more than that, it changes the culture of the organisation.”

People with a lived experience of homelessness come with diverse histories and identities and hold a range of specialised skills and knowledge that is currently untapped by many policy makers and institutions. Sharon, Spike and Meg, have shown how incorporating people with a lived experience of homelessness helps to expel myths, challenge stereotypes and ultimately helps us realise that ‘we’ are no different from ‘them’.

To ensure that people have a say in the policies that impact them, we need to make significant organisational changes and make the effort to reach people with a lived experience. In understanding where to start, Spike offers a valuable suggestion:

“Start by inviting people into a space that’s equal, safe, respectful and open and show that you’re willing to listen. It’s important. We do it everyday in our relationships. We want to be respectful to people we care about, so we listen. It’s not rocket science.”

Want to know more?

You can use the following collection of resources to learn more about how you can incorporate lived experience into your policy and practice:

We Are Here: Stories of Home, Place & Belonging

Need to Know Homeless

Black Dog Institute Lived Experience Framework

Everybody’s Home Campaign

Council to Homeless Persons Peer Education Program

AIDS Drug Information Collective

The Big Issue

Vixen Collective

Queensland Framework for the Development of the Mental Health Lived Experience Workforce