For Consultants
Your experience is expertise. Get prepared to use it.
You've navigated systems most people only see on paper. LELI prepares you to put that knowledge to work as a paid professional consultant — shaping the policies and programs that shaped your life.
This Is Not a Focus Group
You won't just be heard. You'll be prepared, paid, and at the table.
Plenty of programs ask people with lived experience to share their story and go home. LELI is built differently:
You're paid for your expertise
Not a stipend, not a gift card — professional compensation for professional work, from training through deployment.
You're prepared, not just invited
Before your advisory work begins, you'll learn how the institutions you'll advise actually operate — its structures, its money, its language, its decision-making — so you can advise with full command of the room.
You do real work
You'll consult on active plans, sit in implementation workgroups as a participant, evaluate live programs, and lead community research. Your findings are documented and attributed to you.
Your work builds a career
You leave with a consulting portfolio, a professional network, and skills in growing demand — plus ongoing advisory relationships that continue past your first year.
Phase One · Months 1–4
The preparation that turns what you know into what you can deploy.
How the system works
Which departments do what, how governance bodies connect, how money flows in and through the system, and how a proposal actually becomes policy. The map nobody handed you when you were navigating it.
The systems, from the other side of the desk
Coordinated entry, data systems, continuum of care governance, funding streams, eligibility rules — you'll understand how the machinery you navigated is built, and where your knowledge fits into improving it.
The language of policy
How to read a strategic plan. How to interpret performance data. How to turn what you know into findings a department can act on — specific, documented, and timed to when decisions get made.
Consulting and research skills
Running community feedback sessions, verifying patterns, documenting your reasoning, presenting findings in writing and in the room.
Directing AI as your research tool
You'll direct AI to do the heavy lifting — reading thousands of community comments, translating languages, flagging patterns — while you keep the judgment, the interpretation, and the final word. A skill set employers across sectors are looking for.
You'll also be introduced to staff and system partners throughout, so the relationships your consulting depends on are already in place when deployment begins.
Phase Two · Months 5–12
Real work inside real policy processes.
Plan consultation
Review drafts and deliver formal input while plans are still being written — right where decisions take shape.
Implementation workgroups
Advise on program design as a participant, keeping implementation true to what the plan intended.
Evaluation
Read performance data alongside community feedback to assess what's working, for whom, and what could work better.
Community research
Lead feedback sessions with people currently navigating the systems you know, so your findings stay grounded in what the community is living right now.
What You Leave With
Skills, income, and a track record that's yours to keep.
Professional pay
Compensation that treats lived expertise as the professional asset it is, from day one of preparation.
A consulting portfolio
Real contributions to real policy processes, documented and attributed to you. Evidence you can show any future client or employer.
A professional network
Working relationships with staff and system partners that persist beyond the program.
AI direction proficiency
Hands-on experience directing AI for research and analysis — one of the fastest-growing skill sets in any sector.
A community of consultants
A roster of peers who share the experience of navigating these systems: collaboration, mutual support, and collective strength beyond your first year.
Ongoing advisory relationships
LELI is a standing program. Your first year is the beginning of your consulting practice, not the end of a program.
Where This Leads
A launchpad, not a one-time program.
Lived experience consulting
Counties, regional bodies, state agencies, and nonprofits increasingly fund lived experience consultation across homelessness, behavioral health, disability, workforce, youth, and aging systems. You'll have the preparation and the track record to do it professionally.
Peer support & direct services
Your experience stacks with peer support certification and roles across outreach, navigation, and housing services.
Policy & systems research
Advocacy organizations, research shops, and government offices need analysts who can connect data to the lived realities behind it.
Program design & evaluation
Experience evaluating live programs — with AI-assisted analysis in your toolkit — translates directly into evaluation and continuous-improvement roles.
Who This Is For
If you've navigated it, you're the expert we're looking for.
- ✓Current or former lived experience of homelessness — sheltered, unsheltered, doubled-up, vehicular, or in transition. You define your experience; we don't gatekeep it.
- ✓Experience navigating a homelessness response system — past or present. Experience with other systems — behavioral health, disability, workforce, reentry, youth, aging — adds to what you bring.
- ✓Any age, any background. Young people with lived experience are encouraged to apply.
- ✓Committed to the full first year — with wraparound support to make that commitment possible.
- ✓No policy, consulting, or research experience required. That's what the preparation builds.
- ✓Currently experiencing homelessness? You are eligible, and we will work with your circumstances — no fixed address or technology required to start.
Our Side of the Table
What every consultant can count on.
- ✓Paid compensation at rates reflecting the professional value of lived expertise and civic research work.
- ✓Wraparound support for transportation, technology, scheduling — and honest guidance on how program pay may interact with any benefits you receive.
- ✓Real access to planning, implementation, and evaluation processes — participant roles with documented findings, not observer seats.
- ✓Attribution — the findings you produce carry your name.
- ✓AI tools that multiply your reach — never replace your judgment.
Ready to put your expertise to work?
No policy background required. No degree required. The expertise you already have is the qualification — the rest is what we build together.