The concepts of lived experience and co-production are everywhere at the moment. You see the terms in policies, funding applications, and strategies, often described as progressive and transformative. On paper, they promise to centre the voices of people who haven’t always been heard. But for organisations like ours – peer-led, supporting adults who were sexually abused as children – this isn’t new language or a new way of working, it’s what we’ve always done.
Lived experience offers something that can’t be taught. You can’t learn it from one manual or pick it up in a short training session. It’s about understanding, not just learning the rules, but absorbing the true ethos and meaning of lived experience and allowing it to guide you. For the people we support, that matters. Many have spent years feeling unheard, disbelieved, or misunderstood. Sitting with someone who gets it, without needing everything explained, can be the moment something shifts. And that’s often where the work really begins. In genuine peer and lived experience-led spaces, relationships feel different because they’re not built on hierarchy or roles, but on trust, shared understanding, and a sense of safety. That doesn’t mean boundaries disappear – it means the connection is real, which is something traditional services often struggle to create.
Co-production is another word that gets used a lot. In theory, it’s about working in partnership: sharing power, making decisions together, recognising different kinds of expertise. But in reality, it doesn’t always look like that. Sometimes it becomes consultation dressed up as collaboration. People are asked for their views, but not really given influence. That’s not how we work. For us, co-production is part of everyday practice. The people we support shape what we do, how we do it, and how we understand whether it’s working. Their voices aren’t added in at the end – they’re there from the start. It takes time and trust, and it means letting go of control in ways that systems don’t always find comfortable. But it leads to something far more meaningful: services that actually reflect the needs and realities of the people they’re there for.
But there are challenges to enacting genuine lived experience-led co-production. When it comes to funding and commissioning, our work often has to be translated into something measurable, structured, and easy to evidence in order to secure support. Our service is commissioned by the NHS, and we’re proud of that. We have a strong, trusting relationship with our commissioner, who genuinely understands our model and the value of peer-led work, a relationship that makes a real difference. They don’t ask us to force our work into rigid tick-box exercises that don’t reflect what actually happens. Instead, our outcomes are measured through feedback from the people we support. The voices of survivors are what define whether the service is making a difference. That feels like it should be the standard, not the exception. Because it means impact is understood in a real way – whether someone feels safer, whether they’ve been able to speak, whether they feel less alone. These are not small things. For many people, they are the first steps towards healing. But we also know this isn’t how it works everywhere. Many organisations are still required to evidence their work through narrow frameworks that don’t capture the depth or complexity of peer-led support. In those spaces, lived experience can start to feel like something that has to be simplified, translated, or reshaped just to fit expectations. Lived experience is valued in principle, but the systems around it don’t always support it in practice.
Peer-led support means people are drawing on their own experiences while supporting others through trauma. It takes emotional energy, awareness, and care. It’s skilled work, even if it’s not always recognised that way. When funding practices don’t understand and value that, it creates pressure: teams stretch themselves, capacity gets tighter, and it becomes harder to sustain the work in a way that’s healthy for everyone involved.
There’s also a risk that lived experience starts to feel like something that’s being used – something to be packaged up and fitted into funding requirements. But lived experience isn’t a resource to be extracted. It’s not something that can be neatly simplified, measured or standardised. Its value is in the connection, the trust, and the moments that don’t easily translate into data.
What we see every day is that when lived experience is genuinely embedded – when people are listened to, when power is shared, when relationships are prioritised – it works. People tell us they feel understood, not in a surface-level way, but in a way that makes them feel less alone. They feel believed. They feel able to engage in ways they haven’t before. Those things might not always show up neatly in a report, but they matter. In many ways, they’re the foundation for everything else. And the fact that our outcomes are measured through those voices, rather than through detached frameworks, makes that even stronger. It means success is defined by the people it actually affects.
Lived experience is not something to be bought, measured, or fitted into a box. It’s human, it’s relational, and it has the power to change lives, but only if it’s treated with care and respect. If we want to keep that integrity, then it needs to be properly supported. That means funding that reflects the reality of the work. It means commissioning that genuinely understands and enables this way of working. And it means trusting the voices of the people at the heart of it. We’re fortunate to have a commissioning relationship that shows what’s possible when that understanding is there. The challenge is making that the norm, not the exception. Because lived experience was never meant to be a commodity. It was meant to be a way of doing things differently – and better.