On Wednesday, November 20th Safe & Sound hosted its third and final Lunch and Learn for the year. This webinar continued the theme of the previous event held in August about ensuring lived experience and expertise are systematically incorporated, analyzed, and referenced when we are evaluating and creating strategies for our work, just as we do with other data. In this session our expert panelists explored how we can move to the next level of engaging lived experience.
Our speakers talked with experience and passion about what excites them about the idea of moving toward lived expertise as data, explained some of the important challenges and considered how these can be addressed.
In Safe & Sound’s own work, the data team ensures lived experience is gathered effectively by working with clients to form the questions themselves, making sure we are asking the right things to get the most useful answers to inform our work. However, we are mindful of the bias even in this approach, that the people who choose to be on our committees might not represent the full population of families that encounter Safe & Sound.
Our expert panelists:
Resources referenced during the webinar:
Drawing from experience writing her dissertation titled, From Mandated Reporter to Community Supporter: Reimagining Schools as the Nexus to Address Intersectional Social Justice, panelist Dr. Charity Chandler-Cole offered ideas and personal experience on how to build a new research framework that engages lived expertise from beginning to end.
Panelist Jess Mussadi discussed a set of toolkits used in other industries to create a trauma-informed environment to engage with communities in a meaningful way in research, without sacrificing rigour:
Watch the video to see the full conversation, and stay tuned for our 2025 Lunch and Learn series commencing in April.