How It Works
Preparation and refinement. From lived experience to living expertise.
LELI is a replicable framework for institutionalizing meaningful engagement of subject matter experts with lived experience. Here's the methodology — what consultants learn, how they're deployed, and how the model adapts from county departments to statewide workgroups.
The Core Insight
Expertise delivers when it's prepared to.
The people who have navigated your systems hold knowledge no survey, dataset, or professional training can replicate: what services feel like from the inside, which handoffs hold, and where a small change would make an outsized difference.
Preparation is what makes that knowledge fully actionable.
Knows which body
A consultant who understands your governance structure knows which body to bring a finding to — and when in the cycle it can still shape the decision.
Knows what's achievable
A consultant fluent in your funding streams knows which recommendations are achievable within existing dollars — and which need a different vehicle.
Connects experience to action
A consultant who can read a strategic plan and interpret performance data connects what the community is experiencing to what your institution can act on.
That's the refinement LELI institutionalizes. The experience stays the foundation. The preparation makes it deployable.
Built for Every Level
Built for the levels where systems are designed.
Counties administer
Coordinated entry, behavioral health, public health, aging services, workforce boards — much of the infrastructure people with lived experience have navigated is administered at county scale.
Regions and states set the terms
Regional plans allocate resources across jurisdictions. State agencies and workgroups write the rules and funding criteria everyone downstream works within.
Nonprofits deliver
Providers and community organizations are where policy becomes a person's experience — the intake, the program, the handoff. Prepared consultants strengthen all three levels.
Cities — particularly large cities with their own service systems — can adapt the framework as well. Every implementation is scoped to the structure it serves. See who we serve.
The Framework · Step 01
Recruit.
Consultants are recruited from the communities the plans are written for: people with current or former lived experience of homelessness, who have navigated homelessness response systems firsthand — and usually several neighboring systems as well.
Recruitment is community-rooted and designed to reach the experts partners most want to hear from: people living unsheltered, families in vehicles, youth on their own, veterans, elders, returning citizens, and people navigating homelessness alongside disability, mental health, or recovery. No policy background is required. That's what the preparation builds.
The Framework · Step 02
Prepare.
Phase One · Months 1–4
Structured preparation across five domains:
Institutional Structures & Governance
How the institution actually works — a county, a regional body, a state agency, or a nonprofit: who delivers which services, how governance bodies relate, how money flows in and through, and how decisions move from proposal to policy.
System Fluency
Deep working knowledge of the systems consultants will advise on — coordinated entry, data and performance infrastructure, continuum of care governance, funding mechanisms, eligibility structures — plus the neighboring systems each consultant has navigated.
Policy Language & Methodology
How to read a strategic plan. How to interpret system performance data. How to translate firsthand knowledge into findings that are documented, specific, and mapped to decisions a department can actually make.
Consulting & Research Skills
Running community feedback sessions, verifying patterns, documenting reasoning, and delivering findings in the formats decision-makers use — written submissions, testimony, briefings.
Directing AI as a Tool
Consultants learn to direct AI to handle scale — reading thousands of community inputs, translating across languages, flagging patterns — while judgment, interpretation, and meaning-making stay in human hands.
Phase One also includes structured introductions to staff and system partners, so the working relationships consulting depends on are in place before deployment begins.
The Framework · Step 03
Deploy.
Phase Two · Months 5–12
Consultants move into active advisory work across real policy and program processes:
Plan Consultation
Reviewing drafts and delivering formal input while plans are being written.
Implementation Workgroups
Advising on program design as participants, helping implementation stay true to each plan's intent.
Evaluation & Performance Review
Reading system performance data alongside community feedback to assess what's working, for whom, and what could work better.
Community Research
Leading feedback sessions with people currently navigating these systems, keeping findings grounded in what the community is experiencing right now.
A Standing Program
The first year builds the consultant. The program builds the institution's capacity.
LELI is not a cohort that ends. It's standing infrastructure:
A growing roster
Each preparation cycle adds consultants; advisory capacity compounds rather than resets.
Ongoing advisory relationships
Prepared consultants continue working with departments beyond their first year — carrying institutional knowledge across policy cycles, budget years, and plan updates.
Continuous recruitment
As the program matures, recruitment becomes rolling, and experienced consultants help prepare the next generation.
Institutionalized engagement
Meaningful engagement stops being a per-project procurement and becomes a permanent capacity.
Why It Pays
One investment. Compounding returns.
- ✓Every engagement hour counts. Preparation happens before advisory work begins, so departments engage consultants who are ready on day one.
- ✓Findings arrive actionable. System-fluent consultants deliver recommendations mapped to the levers departments control, on the timelines decisions actually run on.
- ✓Value crosses departments. One consultant's preparation returns value in every system they've navigated — and co-funding distributes the cost.
- ✓Knowledge compounds. A standing roster retains relationships, context, and institutional memory that grow more valuable each cycle.
See what the framework looks like for your organization.
Every implementation is scoped to your structure, priorities, and scale. For consultants: your experience is the foundation — the preparation is what we build together.