LELI trains people who have experienced homelessness — and navigated the continuum of care firsthand — to become paid lived experience consultants shaping strategic plans to reduce homelessness: their design, their implementation, and their evaluation. Our flagship partnership is with Contra Costa County, and the training can be customized for any municipality.
Nobody knows how to help the homelessness response system work better than the people who've been inside it. LELI trains them to put that knowledge to work — translating firsthand experience into the analysis, consultation, and partnership that strengthens policy.
Fellows develop deep self-validation, learning to operate with confidence in rooms where their expertise may not yet be recognized — because it always was.
Fellows deepen their firsthand knowledge of the Continuum of Care, coordinated entry, County health and housing services, funding streams, and how decisions get made — so they can contribute as informed partners.
Fellows learn to direct AI to handle scale — analyzing plans, data, and thousands of community inputs at once — while keeping judgment and meaning-making in human hands.
Fellows bring their analysis to the bodies that guide the County's homelessness response — Continuum of Care committees, County boards, and the public processes where the strategic plan takes shape.
The fellowship runs a full 12 months. Fellows are paid for their expertise and engaged in the County's real planning processes from day one.
Training in leadership identity, homelessness system fluency, consulting and research skills, and directing AI as a research tool. Fellows begin building relationships with County staff and Continuum of Care partners.
Applied consulting across the full arc of the County's strategic plan to reduce homelessness — reviewing drafts, joining implementation workgroups, and evaluating outcomes on the timelines active decisions actually run on.
The homelessness response system hears from the community every day — at public hearings, in intake conversations, through surveys and outreach. The Civic Signals Network connects those voices into something the county has never had: a closer-to-real-time picture of homelessness between annual Point-in-Time counts. Fellows read across volume, surface patterns, and carry findings into the strategic planning process — a living feedback loop no single team could build alone.
AI handles scale. Fellows handle truth.
The people working in Contra Costa's homelessness response bring dedication, data, and professional skill. Lived experience consultants bring the one perspective no training can provide: what services feel like from the inside, which handoffs work smoothly, and where a small change would make a big difference. And because lived experience rarely stays in one lane, Fellows carry that same insight into the other systems they've navigated — behavioral health, disability, workforce development, reentry, youth welfare, and aging. Together, that partnership produces plans that work better for everyone, across every service the County delivers.
"The strongest plans are written by the people who run the system and the people who've navigated it — working side by side."
Three dimensions of impact — for Fellows, for the community, and for the system that serves them both.
The Fellowship is open to anyone with current or former lived experience of homelessness — in Contra Costa County or your own community. No policy background required — that's what we build together.