About LELI
Built by living expertise. Designed for institutionalization.
The Lived Experience Leadership Institute exists to make one thing permanent: the meaningful engagement of subject matter experts with lived experience — prepared, paid, and at the tables where policy takes shape.
Why LELI Exists
The people closest to the problem hold the deepest expertise for solving it. Preparation is what puts it to work.
Counties, regional commissions, state agencies, and nonprofits are bringing lived experience into planning, implementation, and evaluation — and they're right to. No dataset, no consultant report, no professional training can substitute for knowing a system from the inside.
LELI was founded on the next insight: that expertise delivers its full value when it's prepared. When subject matter experts with lived experience understand the structures, funding streams, governance, and policy language of the bodies they advise, their knowledge stops being testimony and becomes strategy — findings a department can act on, timed to the decisions being made.
LELI institutionalizes that preparation. Not a one-time program. Not a single engagement. A standing capacity that refines lived experience into living expertise, year over year.
Where LELI Comes From
This framework wasn't designed about the work. It was designed from inside it.
LELI comes from the lived experience of its founder — and from years spent doing exactly the work the framework now prepares others to do.
Loren Dalbert has navigated homelessness twice. He has lived most of his life in poverty, served in the military, and navigated the county systems that surround housing instability — as the person on the other side of the desk. He then spent years as a lived experience consultant inside county government: sitting in strategic planning rooms, joining implementation workgroups with department and division leadership, and helping shape how a county plans, delivers, and evaluates its homelessness response.
That work surfaced two truths.
First: lived experience rarely stays in one lane. Navigating homelessness usually means also navigating behavioral health, disability services, workforce systems, reentry, youth services, or aging supports — often several at once, often for family as well as self. One consultant carries a whole map of systems with them.
Second: one prepared consultant at the table works. The preparation — learning the county's language, its structures, its funding, its rhythms — is what turned firsthand knowledge into advisory capability that departments could actually use. But that preparation happened the hard way: alone, over years, without a curriculum.
LELI is the answer to a simple question: what if that preparation were institutionalized? What if every county, region, state agency, and nonprofit could refine the expertise already present in its community — systematically, professionally, and permanently?
One consultant at that table works. It shouldn't be singular.
The Team
The people behind LELI.
LELI is built by a partnership that pairs lived experience of the systems the framework addresses with more than a decade of human-centered design practice inside government.
Founder & Framework Designer
Loren Dalbert
Dalbert Design
A community systems designer focused on integrating lived experience into public policy design. Loren created the LELI framework and curriculum, designed the CoCo Go BIG guaranteed income pilot, and served as Program Manager of the East Contra Costa Mobility LABs initiative.
A disabled veteran who has navigated homelessness twice, he designs from both sides of the table: the navigator's knowledge of how systems actually feel, and the consultant's fluency in how they actually run. Based in Antioch, California.
Co-Director
Judi Brown
CivicMakers
A creative systems thinker and human-centered design practitioner with over a decade in social innovation and graduate education in public administration and policy. As Co-Founder and Managing Partner of CivicMakers, Judi designs immersive, accessible learning experiences — from graduate-level courses to co-design sessions with women business owners in Kenya to trainings with municipal staff at every level.
On LELI: curriculum and learning design, facilitation practice, and the evaluation framework that measures what preparation actually produces.
Organizational Partners
Three layers of infrastructure.
LELI is delivered through a partnership built to combine lived-experience leadership, proven public-sector delivery capacity, and rigorous charitable compliance — so partners at every level can contract with confidence.
Dalbert Design
Lived Experience Led · Framework Lead
A Lived Experience Led Organization founded by Loren Dalbert. Contributes the LELI framework and curriculum, the community-rooted recruitment approach, and the lived-experience leadership that anchors how consultants are prepared and deployed.
CivicMakers
Delivery Partner
A strategic consultancy and community of practitioners with over ten years of human-centered design work alongside governments, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations. Brings institutional capacity in community engagement, facilitation, training design, and the operational infrastructure public funders require.
civicmakers.com →Realize Impact
Fiscal Sponsor · 501(c)(3)
A registered 501(c)(3) public charity specializing in fiscal sponsorship of mission-driven projects. Provides the charitable umbrella, financial oversight, grants administration, and reimbursement-grant cash-flow management — removing compliance risk from the partner's side of the table.
How giving works →The expertise is already in your community. LELI prepares it.
For partners: bring living expertise into the rooms where your plans take shape. For consultants: your experience is the foundation.