Blog: How to build lived experience into board governance

We’ve already looked at why an organisation or board may want to encourage lived experience as part of their governance. This ‘why’ will look different for every organisation. Similarly, every organisation will have a slightly different approach to encouraging voices of lived experience into their decision-making.

In this instalment, we will focus on the ‘how.’ Specifically, how can organisations prepare to undertake this work?

Reflection

For organisations looking to adopt lived experience as part of their board or governance, it’s important not to rush in without first reflecting on what’s come before and what their goals are. Not doing this important reflective work could result in a process that feels tokenistic or that doesn’t feel grounded in the strategic aims of the organisation.

Below are some prompts which might help with this reflection work:

• Have we tried this before? Have there been past attempts to encourage lived experience involvement in the organisation’s governance – if so, what learning can be taken from this?
• What barriers might exist to becoming part of the trustee board?
• What does lived experience mean in your setting?
• Think about what method of involvement would make the most sense for your type of organisation – in situations where becoming a trustee doesn’t feel like the right fit, are there other ways the individual could influence or contribute to decision-making?
• What are the aims of this work?
• What have people with lived experience already told you about their experiences of being involved, or said about how they would like to be involved?

Preparation

After reflecting, organisations can begin to prepare to start the change process.

This doesn’t have to mean knowing exactly how the new way of doing things is going to look. For example, you may have an idea of what might work as an organisation, but it is important any initial ideas are open to change so that you can involve the people with lived experience in the decisions about how they will contribute to your organisation’s governance from the start in a meaningful way.

However, there should be a clear starting point and desired outcome to provide an idea of what is needed to be able to progress the anticipated work. For example, regarding resources and capacity to allow you to determine who will be involved in the change process and what they will need to do this work. Or it might be about building skills and knowledge within the organisation so that team members feel confident about how to move forward.

At THRE, we have a range of free training, courses and resources that may help with this step of the process. For instance, our PANEL e-learning course provides an interactive framework for planning out projects with human rights and equalities at their core.

Planning

This learning and preparation should bring you to a point where you feel equipped to identify the key actions needed and ready to get started!

Here’s how Neighbourhood Networks planned their governance restructure:

Neighbourhood Networks are an organisation that supports adults with learning disabilities, autism, mental health and physical disabilities to be involved within their local communities. They are committed to incorporating lived experience within their governance structure and have recently undertaken a review of how they do this.

Below are some insights from Neighbourhood Networks about how they prepared for this work.

You went from having member trustees as the way lived experience was part of your governance to establishing a lived experience advisory group – why did decide you needed to do this and what did you do to make this change happen?

We carried out a trustee review with member trustees who were unable to clarify their role, and it was clear they were unsure of their roles and responsibilities as trustees. We worked with them to identify learning needs and throughout this process it was clear they were no longer interested or able to commit to being a trustee. This showed us that our governance structure was not as strong as we had hoped and did not create space for members voices to be heard and amplified. This began our work with restructuring and making sure we had as much knowledge as possible to ensure our governance was accessible, engaging and fit for purpose to include the voices of our members with lived experience.

We then took our time to evaluate our current practices and look at where we were hearing members voices and where we weren’t. We conducted an organisation wide survey to gather the thoughts of staff in relation to member involvement within the organisation and found that we were lacking a place for members to truly have their voice heard and be able to make a genuine impact within a more formal structure.

How did THRE help with this process?

We attended THRE’s ‘Governance – A Human Rights and Equalities First Approach’ training which highlighted that just having lived experience within the board and governance wasn’t enough. This led to a conversation at the organisation and the realisation that we wanted to create a safe space where our members were comfortable sharing their opinions and able to express their needs not only as members but also as people with different life experiences of having a disability.

We spoke with other third sector organisations and with staff within THRE to discuss our situation and a shadow board/advisory group was suggested. THRE staff supported our thoughts by sharing resources and also highlighting the importance of using a Human Rights and Equalities First Approach to our work.

We are now well underway with our new advisory group NNAG and consistently reflecting on how we can continue to ensure members are the experts sharing their knowledge with us to help shape our organisation to be as member lead as possible and create a positive culture where lived experience is the first consideration when looking to make change.