LELI prepares people with lived experience to work as professional consultants across your county's service systems — fluent in your language, your structures, your governance, and your policy cycles. Meaningful engagement of subject matter experts with lived experience.
"I've navigated homelessness and the systems built to respond to it."
Essential. Irreplaceable. The one perspective no training can provide — and the foundation everything else is built on.
"I've navigated homelessness — and I understand this county's coordinated entry system, its funding streams, its governance bodies, its policy calendar, and how decisions actually get made."
The same experience, refined into strategic capability. Ready to advise on day one. Able to anticipate downstream effects. Fluent enough to contribute while plans are being written — right where decisions take shape.
Counties across the country are building lived experience engagement into planning, implementation, and evaluation — advisory bodies, consultant contracts, governance seats. It's the right direction: the people who have navigated your systems hold expertise no other source can provide.
Preparation is what unlocks that expertise's full value. When subject matter experts with lived experience understand your county's structures, funding flows, and policy language, their insight connects directly to the levers your departments control — and every engagement hour delivers.
Better policy. Better programs. Better return on every engagement dollar.
People with lived experience of homelessness and the systems that surround it — recruited from the communities your plans are written for.
Months of structured preparation: county structures and governance, system fluency, policy language and methodology, consulting and research skills, and directing AI as an analysis tool.
Consultants advise across your active policy and program work — plan consultation, implementation workgroups, evaluation, and real-time community research — as system-fluent partners.
Lived experience rarely stays in one lane. Navigating homelessness usually means also navigating behavioral health, disability services, workforce development, reentry, youth services, or aging systems — often several at once, often for family as well as self.
Every LELI Consultant carries that whole map. Prepare one consultant, and you've strengthened planning, implementation, and evaluation across every system they've navigated.
That's why LELI is built for counties: one preparation investment, returns across every department. Co-fund it across departments, and the value multiplies while the cost distributes.
Bring living expertise into the rooms where your plans take shape. Tell us about your county and we'll come back with a scoped proposal.