LELI helps counties get the full value of lived experience engagement — by institutionalizing the preparation that refines lived experience into living expertise. Better policy. Better programs. Better return on every engagement dollar.
Counties across the country are building lived experience engagement into planning, implementation, and evaluation — through advisory bodies, consultant contracts, and governance seats. It's the right direction: the people who have navigated your systems hold expertise no other source can provide.
LELI takes that commitment further. When subject matter experts with lived experience are prepared to understand your county's structures, funding streams, governance, and policy calendar, their expertise becomes fully actionable:
LELI is a standing, county-institutionalized program that recruits people with lived experience from your community and prepares them — through months of structured training — to consult at the level your departments operate.
LELI Consultants understand your coordinated entry system, your funding streams, your governance bodies, and your policy calendar before their advisory work begins.
Findings arrive documented, attributed, and timed to your decision cycles — plan input while plans are being written, evaluation findings while programs are being reviewed.
Through consultant-led feedback sessions, your county gains a continuous picture of how services are working on the ground.
A standing roster means expertise, relationships, and institutional knowledge stay with the county and grow over time.
Lived experience rarely stays in one lane. The subject matter expert who has navigated your homelessness response system has often also navigated behavioral health, disability services, workforce development, reentry, youth services, or aging supports — frequently several at once, for themselves or for family.
A LELI Consultant is prepared to consult across that whole map. One preparation investment returns value across every department whose system that consultant knows from the inside.
That's why LELI is designed for multi-department co-funding: each participating department contributes a share, each gains access to prepared consultants, and the value multiplies while the cost distributes.
One or two departments launch the program around an active priority — a strategic plan cycle, a major implementation effort, an evaluation year. Smallest footprint, fastest start, designed to expand.
Participating departments share the program's cost and its consultant roster. Each gains prepared consultants for its own planning and evaluation work; the county gains a shared, cross-system advisory capacity.
LELI operates as permanent county infrastructure — a standing roster, continuous recruitment, and county-wide community research. Meaningful engagement becomes part of how the county does business.
Every implementation is scoped to your county's structure, priorities, and scale.
We map your county's engagement commitments, active policy cycles, and department priorities to identify where prepared consultants deliver the most immediate value.
The framework is customized to your governance structure, service systems, and scale. The funding model and participation agreements take shape with the departments involved.
Consultants are recruited from your community and complete structured preparation: county structures and governance, system fluency, policy language and methodology, consulting and research skills, and AI direction.
Consultants begin advisory work inside your active processes — plan consultation, implementation workgroups, evaluation, and community feedback sessions.
The roster grows, new departments join, and community research deepens. The program compounds year over year.
The goal is a standing capacity your county owns.
Every LELI implementation is scoped with measurable commitments, including:
Specific targets are set with your county during design.
Tell us about your county — your priorities, your active cycles, your goals — and we'll come back with a scoped proposal.