For County Leaders & Departments
Meaningful engagement of subject matter experts with lived experience.
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.
Not a county? LELI also works with regional commissions, state workgroups, and nonprofits
The Opportunity
Your county is already invested in this. LELI multiplies the return.
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:
- ✓Insight that lands. System-fluent consultants can connect what they know to the levers your departments actually control — so recommendations arrive ready to act on.
- ✓Value from day one. Preparation happens before advisory work begins, so every engagement hour goes toward your priorities.
- ✓Knowledge that compounds. A standing roster means relationships and learning carry forward across contracts, cohorts, and policy cycles.
- ✓A signal you can steer by. Consultants trained in community research give your county a continuous picture of how services are landing — between annual counts, in time to act.
The LELI Approach
Prepared experts. Strategic partnership. Lasting capacity.
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.
System-fluent consultants
LELI Consultants understand your coordinated entry system, your funding streams, your governance bodies, and your policy calendar before their advisory work begins.
Policy-ready analysis
Findings arrive documented, attributed, and timed to your decision cycles — plan input while plans are being written, evaluation findings while programs are being reviewed.
Real-time community signal
Through consultant-led feedback sessions, your county gains a continuous picture of how services are working on the ground.
Institutional continuity
A standing roster means expertise, relationships, and institutional knowledge stay with the county and grow over time.
Return on Investment
Preparation multiplies the value of engagement.
Consultants build system knowledge during the engagement
Consultants arrive system-fluent; advisory work starts on day one
Input requires interpretation before it can guide action
Findings arrive contextualized and mapped to the levers you control
Feedback follows the decision cycle
Findings are timed to active policy and budget cycles
Each engagement starts fresh
A standing roster compounds knowledge and relationships
One engagement serves one department
One prepared consultant serves every system they've navigated
Fulfills the engagement commitment
Fulfills the commitment — and strengthens the programs it exists to serve
The County-Scale Advantage
One expert strengthens every system they've navigated.
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.
How Counties Fund It
Three ways in. One standing program.
Pilot
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.
Multi-Department Co-Funded
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.
Full County Integration
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.
From Decision to Deployment
What launching LELI looks like.
Assessment
We map your county's engagement commitments, active policy cycles, and department priorities to identify where prepared consultants deliver the most immediate value.
Design
The framework is customized to your governance structure, service systems, and scale. The funding model and participation agreements take shape with the departments involved.
Recruit & Prepare
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.
Deploy
Consultants begin advisory work inside your active processes — plan consultation, implementation workgroups, evaluation, and community feedback sessions.
Sustain & Scale
The roster grows, new departments join, and community research deepens. The program compounds year over year.
Implementation Support
LELI delivers the framework. Your county keeps the capacity.
- ✓Diagnostic and design — engagement mapping, governance design, funding model development
- ✓Recruitment infrastructure — community-rooted outreach and selection designed to reach the experts your systems know best
- ✓Curriculum and preparation delivery — the full training arc, customized to your county's systems and language
- ✓First-year partnership support — coaching, troubleshooting, and refinement as the program takes root
The goal is a standing capacity your county owns.
What You Can Measure
Defined outcomes from day one.
Every LELI implementation is scoped with measurable commitments, including:
- ✓Consultants recruited, prepared, and deployed
- ✓Formal contributions delivered into active planning, implementation, and evaluation processes
- ✓Community research findings delivered between annual counts
- ✓Consultant-reported growth in leadership identity and civic self-efficacy
- ✓Sustained advisory relationships between consultants and county bodies beyond the initial engagement
Specific targets are set with your county during design.
Turn your engagement commitment into your strongest asset.
Tell us about your county — your priorities, your active cycles, your goals — and we'll come back with a scoped proposal.