Who We Serve
Living expertise belongs at every table where policy takes shape.
Homelessness and the systems around it aren't governed at one level. They're funded by states, coordinated by regions, administered by counties, and delivered by nonprofits. LELI prepares consultants with lived experience to advise at every one of them.
Four Levels. One Preparation.
Wherever decisions get made, lived expertise makes them better.
A policy written at the state level lands in a regional plan, gets administered by a county, and reaches a person through a nonprofit's front door. Every handoff is a place where it can drift from what people actually need.
LELI Consultants have lived at the end of that chain. Prepared in the structures, funding, and language of the body they're advising, they bring that knowledge back up it — to whichever table is making the decision.
Counties
Where the systems are administered — departments, boards, and continuums of care.
County track →Regional Planning Committees & Commissions
Where jurisdictions coordinate — shared plans across city and county lines.
Regional track →State Workgroups
Where policy is set and funded — agencies, councils, task forces, advisory boards.
State track →Nonprofit Organizations
Where services are delivered — providers, community organizations, and advocates.
Nonprofit track →Counties
Where the systems are administered.
Coordinated entry, behavioral health, public health, aging services, workforce — the infrastructure people with lived experience have navigated is largely run at county scale. That's where LELI began, and where a standing program has the most room to compound: one roster of prepared consultants advising across every department whose system they know from the inside.
Where consultants contribute
- ✓Strategic plans and policy cycles — formal input while plans are still being written, timed to budget and board calendars.
- ✓Implementation workgroups — participant seats that keep program design true to what the plan intended.
- ✓Evaluation — performance data read alongside community feedback, between annual counts.
- ✓Standing multi-department capacity — a shared roster co-funded across departments, so the value multiplies while the cost distributes.
Regional Planning Committees & Commissions
Where jurisdictions coordinate.
People don't experience homelessness inside one city's limits. They move between jurisdictions for shelter, work, family, and services — which means the most accurate map of a region's systems is carried by the people who've crossed its lines. Regional bodies are built to see across those boundaries. Prepared consultants help them see it from the ground.
Where consultants contribute
- ✓Regional plans and needs assessments — findings that reflect how people actually move through the region, not just how each jurisdiction reports.
- ✓Cross-jurisdiction alignment — surfacing the gaps and handoffs that fall between member cities and counties.
- ✓Commission and committee seats — prepared members who can contribute fully from their first meeting.
- ✓Community research across the region — feedback sessions spanning member jurisdictions, analyzed together.
State Workgroups
Where policy is set and funded.
State agencies, interagency councils, legislative task forces, and statewide advisory boards write the rules and the funding criteria everyone downstream works within. It's also the level furthest from the people those rules reach. A consultant prepared in state structures closes that distance — bringing what implementation actually looks like on the ground into the room where the next program gets designed.
Where consultants contribute
- ✓Policy design and rulemaking — input while guidance, regulations, and standards are still in draft.
- ✓Funding program design — eligibility, criteria, and reporting requirements shaped by people who've lived under them.
- ✓Statewide workgroup and advisory board seats — members fluent in state process, not just present in it.
- ✓Bridging state policy to local implementation — tracing how a statewide decision lands across counties, and reporting back.
Nonprofit Organizations
Where services are delivered.
Nonprofits are where policy becomes a person's experience — the intake, the program, the handoff. Service providers, community-based organizations, and advocacy groups already know lived experience matters. Prepared consultants turn that commitment into program design and evaluation that holds up with funders, boards, and the people you serve.
Where consultants contribute
- ✓Program design and redesign — shaping services around how people actually move through them.
- ✓Evaluation and continuous improvement — outcomes data paired with what participants are experiencing now.
- ✓Board and advisory committee seats — prepared members who can engage on budgets, strategy, and governance.
- ✓Strategic plans and funding proposals — lived expertise documented in the formats funders ask for.
The Multi-Level Advantage
One consultant. Every level.
The same person who has navigated a nonprofit's shelter program has lived under the county's coordinated entry, the region's allocation plan, and the state's funding rules — all at once. That's a map no single level of government holds on its own.
Prepare that consultant once, and their expertise can inform the decision wherever it's being made.
Lived experience runs through every level of the system. LELI prepares it to advise at each one.
How Engagements Work
Scoped to the body it serves.
Assessment
We map your decision calendar, your engagement commitments, and the systems you touch — to find where prepared consultants add the most value, soonest.
Preparation built on your materials
The curriculum is adapted to your structures — your governance, your funding, your plans, your language — so consultants arrive fluent in the body they're advising.
Deployment into live work
Consultants join your active processes — plans in draft, workgroups in session, programs under review — as participants with documented, attributed findings.
Defined outcomes
Every engagement is scoped with measurable commitments, set with you during design, so you can show what lived expertise changed.
Bring living expertise to your table.
County, region, state, or nonprofit — tell us about the decisions in front of you, and we'll come back with a proposal scoped to fit.