Lived Experience Leadership Institute
Institutionalize living expertise wherever policy takes shape.
LELI prepares people with lived experience to work as professional consultants for counties, regional commissions, state workgroups, and nonprofits — fluent in your language, your structures, your governance, and your policy cycles.
The Difference That Changes Everything
Lived experience is where it starts. Living expertise is what delivers.
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.
Living Expertise
"I've navigated homelessness — and I understand this county's coordinated entry system, its funding streams, its governance bodies, and how decisions actually get made."
The same experience, refined into strategic capability. Ready to advise on day one. Fluent enough to contribute while plans are being written.
LELI institutionalizes the preparation and refinement of lived experience into living expertise.
The Opportunity
Public systems are investing in lived experience engagement. Preparation multiplies the return.
Counties, regional commissions, state agencies, and nonprofits 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 structures, funding flows, and policy language, their insight connects directly to the levers you control.
Better policy. Better programs. Better return on every engagement dollar.
The Framework
Recruit. Prepare. Deploy.
Recruit
People with lived experience of homelessness and the systems that surround it — recruited from the communities your plans are written for.
Prepare
Months of structured preparation: institutional structures and governance, system fluency, policy language and methodology, consulting and research skills, and directing AI as an analysis tool.
Deploy
Consultants advise across your active policy and program work — plan consultation, implementation workgroups, evaluation, and real-time community research.
Who We Serve
Every level where policy takes shape.
Homelessness and the systems around it are funded by states, coordinated by regions, administered by counties, and delivered by nonprofits. LELI prepares consultants to advise at every one of them.
Counties
Departments, boards, and continuums of care — where the systems are administered.
Learn more →Regional Planning Committees & Commissions
Shared plans across city and county lines — where jurisdictions coordinate.
Learn more →State Workgroups
Agencies, councils, and task forces — where policy is set and funded.
Learn more →Nonprofit Organizations
Providers and community organizations — where services are delivered.
Learn more →The Multi-System Advantage
One consultant. Every table.
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.
One preparation investment returns value across every system that consultant knows — whether the table is a county department, a regional commission, a state workgroup, or a nonprofit program.
Turn your engagement commitment into your strongest asset.
Bring living expertise into the rooms where your plans take shape. Tell us about your organization and we'll come back with a scoped proposal.