From Lived Experience to Lasting Change: Leading with Community Voices
Inclusion isn’t just about consultation—it’s about power. And when it comes to environmental justice, the most powerful insights don’t always come from policy desks or research reports. They come from lived experience.
Lived Experience Leads (LELs) are people with direct, personal knowledge of the systems, spaces and barriers that policies often fail to address. They may have experienced environmental harm, displacement, marginalisation, or exclusion from decision-making. In the Inclusive Environments Framework, LELs are not an afterthought. They are central to the entire process.
Why Lived Experience Matters in Environmental Work
Environmental justice is, by nature, intersectional. It exists at the overlap of climate, community, identity, and power. Yet in many institutional approaches to sustainability, the people most affected are excluded from the very conversations that shape their futures.
Lived experience brings the real-world clarity and contextual understanding that formal assessments often miss. For example:
A low-income resident might point out how a flood risk plan ignores public transport realities.
A disabled person might highlight how “green infrastructure” often lacks accessibility.
A frontline worker might raise safety concerns in plans for urban renewal or waste processing.
These aren’t abstract critiques. They’re insights that can reshape a project—making it more effective, more just, and more widely supported.
What Are Lived Experience Leads?
Within the Inclusive Environments Framework, Lived Experience Leads (LELs) are identified individuals or small groups who:
Bring expertise based on their first-hand experience of environmental and structural inequality.
Actively contribute to planning, assessing, and shaping environmental initiatives.
Hold institutions accountable to equity goals, while co-producing solutions.
LELs may come from within a community, from staff or student groups, or from external organisations. What matters most is that they are resourced, respected, and supported—not tokenised.
Where They Fit in the Framework
The Inclusive Environments Framework weaves lived experience throughout its nine-stage structure, including:
Educate & Empower: LELs are part of initial training and orientation. They help shape shared language and goals, from the very start.
Explore / Scope / Gather: LELs contribute to framing the questions being asked, guiding what data is collected and how it’s interpreted.
Conversations: Their perspectives inform stakeholder dialogues, ensuring marginalised voices are not lost in consensus.
Assess & Act: LELs help evaluate impact and co-create responses that reflect real needs and constraints—not just idealised scenarios.
Rather than involving people after decisions are drafted, the framework positions LELs as collaborators throughout.
What Support Do LELs Need?
For this approach to work, institutions must invest in enabling leadership from those outside traditional hierarchies. That means:
Paying people for their time. LELs are providing professional insight and labour. They should be compensated accordingly.
Reducing barriers to participation. This could include flexible timings, hybrid meetings, accessible formats, and emotional support.
Recognising power dynamics. Institutions must create safe, respectful environments where challenge is welcome and expertise is recognised—especially when it comes from outside the academic or professional sector.
What Institutions Gain
Too often, the sector talks about “engagement” as a checkbox. But when lived experience is integrated meaningfully, the benefits go far deeper:
Better policy. Grounded, realistic and more responsive to the people it’s meant to serve.
Higher trust. When people see themselves in a process, they are more likely to support its outcomes.
Shared ownership. LELs can help carry momentum forward—into communities, campaigns and wider systems change.
Institutions also gain credibility. In a time of increasing scrutiny over performative or extractive approaches to EDI and sustainability, meaningful lived experience leadership shows you’re doing the work.
From Participation to Power
This isn’t just about asking different questions. It’s about asking different people—and making space for their answers to matter. Lived experience leadership challenges the idea that expertise only looks one way. It says: if your work isn’t shaped by the people it affects, who is it really for?
The Inclusive Environments Framework recognises that. It creates space for institutions to move beyond token consultation and into long-term, co-owned environmental action.
Because when lived experience leads, lasting change follows.
