The Curriculum
What preparation actually looks like.
The LELI curriculum is the engine of the framework — a structured course of preparation that refines lived experience into living expertise. Here's what consultants learn, how it's taught, and how it adapts to the institution it serves.
How It's Built
Real materials. Applied practice. Built for the experts in the room.
Built from your own materials
The curriculum isn't a generic civics course. It's constructed from the implementing organization's own resources — adopted budgets, organizational charts, board and commission agendas, published strategic plans, funding guidelines, program presentations. Consultants prepare on the actual documents and structures they'll be advising on.
Designed for adult experts
Consultants arrive with deep knowledge; the curriculum is built to organize and extend it, not talk past it. Sessions are discussion-driven and grounded in what consultants have lived — every structure studied is one someone in the room has navigated.
Applied from the start
Every domain pairs learning with doing: reading a real plan, interpreting real performance data, drafting real findings. By deployment, nothing is happening for the first time.
Relationship-woven
Staff and system partners participate throughout — presenting how their departments work, joining discussions, building the working relationships Phase Two depends on.
The Core Curriculum
Five domains. One arc.
Institutional Structures & Governance
The map of how the institution actually works.
- How the institution is organized — a county's departments, a region's member jurisdictions, a state agency's divisions, a nonprofit's programs — and what each delivers
- Governance bodies and how they relate — boards, commissions, advisory councils
- The budget: where the money comes from, how it's allocated, and the annual cycle that decides it
- How a proposal becomes policy — and where input enters the process
- Sessions led with staff presenting their own departments and programs
System Fluency
The machinery behind the services, from the other side of the desk.
- The homelessness response system end to end: outreach, coordinated entry, shelter, housing, aftercare
- How performance data is collected and what it does and doesn't capture
- Continuum of care governance and how funding decisions are made
- Funding streams: federal, state, and local dollars, and the requirements attached to each
- Neighboring systems consultants have navigated — behavioral health, disability, workforce, reentry, youth, aging — and how they interconnect
Policy Language & Methodology
Translation in both directions: policy into plain terms, expertise into policy terms.
- How to read a strategic plan: goals, strategies, metrics, and what to look for between the lines
- Interpreting system performance data — and pairing it with what the community knows
- Writing findings that land: specific, documented, and mapped to decisions a department can actually make
- Timing: aligning input to the policy and budget calendars where decisions actually happen
Consulting & Research Skills
The professional practice of lived experience consulting.
- Designing and facilitating community feedback sessions
- Verifying patterns and documenting reasoning so findings carry weight
- Delivering findings in the formats decision-makers use: written submissions, briefings, public testimony
- Professional practice: scoping engagements, working within workgroups, managing the consulting relationship
Directing AI as a Research Tool
Scale for the analysis, judgment stays human.
- Using AI to read and organize large volumes of community input
- AI-assisted translation so every language in the community is part of the analysis
- Pattern detection — and verifying what AI surfaces against community knowledge
- The discipline of direction: AI processes volume; the consultant interprets, decides, and concludes
The Learning Model
Cohort-based. Discussion-driven. Anchored in real work.
Consultants move through the curriculum as a cohort — a community of experts learning alongside each other, comparing what each has navigated, and building the peer network their consulting practice will draw on.
Sessions combine structured learning, guest presentations from staff and system partners, and applied assignments tied to live documents and processes. Wraparound support — transportation, technology, scheduling — is built in so the full cohort can participate fully.
The Handoff
By month five, nothing happens for the first time.
The curriculum runs months one through four. By its close, consultants have read the actual plans, interpreted the actual data, drafted findings in the formats decision-makers use, and met the staff and partners they'll be working with.
Deployment isn't a leap — it's a handoff. Phase Two advisory work begins with relationships in place, fluency established, and expertise ready to deploy.
Adapted to Your Institution
Same domains. Your content.
The five domains are constant. Everything inside them is built for the implementing organization:
- ✓Your structures — the curriculum maps your departments, your governance bodies, your budget cycle
- ✓Your systems — system fluency is trained on how your coordinated entry, data, and funding actually operate
- ✓Your materials — assignments use your published plans, budgets, and agendas
- ✓Your people — your staff present their own work, building relationships as they go
- ✓Your language — consultants prepare in the vocabulary your departments actually use
Curriculum development is part of every LELI implementation — scoped during the design phase.
The preparation is the difference.
For partners: see what the curriculum would look like built on your structures. For consultants: no policy background required — this is where it gets built.