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Centering Lived Expertise: Co-Designing with Survivors

Co-design is a process that actively involves all stakeholders – survivors, children, advocates, administrators, policymakers – to ensure that solutions and processes address everyone’s needs and concerns.

How do we amplify the voices and experiences of survivors in our programs? 
How do we ensure that we are engaging survivors authentically and with care?

We do this by slowing down, listening, and making space for people closest to the harm to share their thinking and expertise. This is part of decolonizing practice, interrogating the places where we hold on to power. Committing to deeply engage with people most impacted by the issues we are working on and creating a space for all voices to be heard transforms our efforts and everyone involved. 

This is co-design, an approach to designing with, not for, people and communities and is an essential part of centering lived expertise, a Promising Futures Guiding Principle. Co-design is a process that actively involves all stakeholders – survivors, children, advocates, administrators, policymakers – to ensure that solutions and processes address everyone’s needs and concerns.

What do we gain from codesign?

  • Strengthens survivor leadership in our movement

  • Improves program uptake and outcomes because of survivor endorsement 

  • Challenges institutions to examine policies and practices that do not value survivor expertise and create meaningful opportunities for them to learn and develop skills.

Co-design may be called different things – survivor centered design, authentic engagement – and can be applied at every level of work, from the local program to the national TA provider. We must begin to practice changing our mindset and experimenting with opportunities to elevate survivor leadership and create the conditions for their meaningful engagement. 

It starts with getting curious, noticing that everything was designed by someone, wondering whose interest the designs serve and reinventing it with survivors to meet their needs first. Learn more from programs that have been working on different types of codesign and experiencing some radical transformations in their communities and their staff. These case studies are illustrations of these efforts.