WHAT HAPPENS WHEN LIVED EXPERIENCE GETS A SEAT AT THE DESIGN TABLE?

The Standing Ovation Problem

Somewhere in America right now, a reentry conference is running its signature session.

A person with lived experience takes the stage.

They tell the story. The room goes quiet. Then it erupts.

Standing ovation. Business cards exchanged.

The keynote speaker is thanked, escorted to the lobby, and the next session begins without them.

The next session is the one about funding. The one about metrics. The one about program design.

Nobody asks why the person who navigated the system’s failure mode is not in the room when the system gets redesigned.

Nobody asks why the standing ovation did not come with a governance seat.

Nobody asks why the most detailed diagnostic data in the building just walked out the door.

Nobody asks, because the field was not built to ask.

It was built to applaud.

Here’s what the research shows:

Organizations often ask people with lived experience for their input, but they don’t always give them the power to make decisions. A 2024 review protocol in BMJ Open identified this as a key problem. It questioned why formal decision-making authority, like the power to change metrics, redirect budgets, or veto designs, remains with leadership, while people with lived experience are limited to providing input and narratives.

A follow-up review in Health Expectations confirmed this pattern across 40 studies. It found that roles for people with lived experience are typically structured for advisory purposes only. In most cases, organizational leaders hold formal governing power (Nelson et al., BMJ Open, March 2024; Levine et al., Health Expectations, March 2025).

Even guidance from the CSG Justice Center’s own Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP) acknowledges this gap. It advises organizations to “identify areas of the process where the panel will be actively involved in decision-making and have an equal say.” This wording suggests that giving people with lived experience an equal voice is the exception, not the standard practice (CSG Justice Center / C4 Innovations, 2024).

The field invites lived experience to speak.

It does not invite it to decide.

“The applause was never the problem. The problem was what happened after it stopped: the design meeting that started without the person who got the standing ovation.”

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The Extraction Economy

The gap between inclusion language and design authority is not accidental.

It is structural.

The reentry field has built a very specific architecture for lived experience, and that architecture has a name: the inspiration-extraction model, a term this author uses to describe the systematic gap between inclusion language and design authority.

It works like this.

An organization hires someone for a role like “peer specialist” or “lived experience coordinator.” While the title sounds meaningful and progressive, the person is often hired to approve the program’s current design, rather than question it.

In December 2024, the CSG Justice Center released a brief about the challenges facing peer support specialists. Based on interviews with peers in Justice and Mental Health Collaboration programs, the report found that the effectiveness of these specialists is consistently limited by how their roles are implemented.

The main structural issue is that peer roles focus on direct service delivery, with no clear path to advance into supervisory, evaluation, or program design positions. This finding reflects broader patterns seen in workforce development.

A May 2025 analysis by the Center for Health Care Strategies found that state behavioral health funders rarely require lived experience governance authority as a grant condition. The compliance threshold typically ends at representation on an advisory board. (CHCS, May 2025)

The knowledge flows in one direction: from the person with lived experience into the system.

The authority stays exactly where it was.

This is not a staffing oversight.

It is a knowledge production problem.

A formerly incarcerated person can tell you which intake question makes people lie.

They can tell you which “support service” goes unused because the office closes at 4:30 and the bus stops running at 5.

They can tell you which metric the program celebrates while the household quietly collapses.

That is not testimony.

That is diagnostic data.

And right now, the field is logging it as inspiration instead of intelligence.

“Organizations integrate lived experience into their language. The governance structure remains unchanged. The metrics stay the same. The design stays the same.”

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The ROI of System Intelligence

Here is the math the field is not running.

Every program that excludes lived experience from design authority is paying for a specification it could get for free.

Every advisory board that advises without authority produces the same recommendations, every quarter, that change nothing.

Design authority, the ability to modify metrics, protocols, or budget allocations, is not a governance nicety. It is the variable that separates programs that produce durable results from programs that produce summary documents.

The Brookings Institution’s 2025 workforce program analysis found that programs with wraparound services, the kind of design that requires practitioners to know which support actually gets used and which goes untouched, produce 12% to 34% durable earnings gains at $5,000 to $28,000 per participant. Programs without that design intelligence produce $1,500 to $2,500 per participant in modest, short-lived gains. (Brookings Institution / ERIC, April 2025)

Old model: Advisory board. Four meetings a year. Summary document. Nothing changes.

New model: Design authority. Metric approval. Budget input. Outcomes that hold at 12 months.

The ROI is not theoretical.

The programs producing durable results are the ones that built their design with the people who know where the system fails.

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Lived Experience Is System Intelligence

Here is the reframe the field needs:

Lived experience is not a perspective to be included.

It’s a unique form of intelligence about a system that can’t be gained in any other way.

In its 2023 National Model Standards for Peer Support Certification, SAMHSA recommends that organizations should use peer knowledge to improve their programs and quality, not just to deliver services. (SAMHSA, June 2023)

But even SAMHSA’s framing stops short of the structural change required.

Integration into evaluation is not the same as authority over design.

A 2026 study confirmed what the field has resisted naming: successful integration of lived experience requires structural reform: changes to governance, authority, and evaluation systems. Not representation alone. Programs that stop at representation produce the same outcomes as programs that never asked. (PMC / Health Research Journal, February 2026)

Consider what a person with 10 years of system contact actually knows.

They understand that measuring stability is different from just measuring compliance.

They know which parole conditions create employment conflicts that never surface in official reports.

They know that the “warm handoff” between prison and community services, celebrated in every reentry model, breaks down at 6 PM on a Friday when the case manager’s phone goes to voicemail and the housing voucher office closed three hours ago.

No survey instrument captures this.

No program evaluation accounts for it.

It is knowledge produced by navigating failure.

It is the single most underleveraged dataset in the workforce development field.

The person who survived the system’s design flaws has a specification sheet that no credentialed expert can write from the outside. The question is whether the field will treat that specification as design input, or continue filing it under “inspiring stories.”

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The Grant Application Test

Here is a scenario that plays out in foundation offices every quarter.

A program officer named Rebecca reviews a grant application from a mid-sized workforce organization. The proposal is polished. The logic model is clean. On page four, under “Community Engagement,” the program lists a “Lived Experience Advisory Board”: twelve people with direct justice system contact, meeting four times a year, providing “guidance and input on program direction.”

Rebecca checks the box. Community voice: included. The application moves to the next round.

But here is what Rebecca does not ask.

Does that advisory board approve the program’s outcome metrics?

Does it have authority to modify intake protocols?

Can it redirect budget allocations?

Does any member sit on the actual governance board with a binding vote?

A 2025 analysis by the Center for Health Care Strategies found that this pattern is the norm, not the exception: state and federal funders systematically underweight governance integration in grant scoring, with compliance thresholds typically ending at advisory board representation. Formal governance power remains with organizational leadership in the majority of programs reviewed. (CHCS, May 2025)

The board advises. Leadership decides.

The metrics stay the same.

The design stays the same.

The advisory board meets again in three months and watches the same recommendations get absorbed into a summary document that changes nothing.

Rebecca is not negligent. She is operating inside a funding architecture that rewards narrative inclusion and does not measure design integration. The incentive structure produces exactly the outcome it was built to produce: programs that look inclusive on paper and operate identically to programs that never asked.

That is not a design partnership.

It is a listening session dressed up as governance.

“If your lived-experience advisory board does not change your metrics, it does not change your outcomes. It changes your optics.”

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What This Means: By Audience

If you are a funder:

1. Add a governance question to your grant application: Does your lived-experience advisory board have binding authority over any program metric, protocol, or budget allocation? Require a yes, not an aspiration.

2. Require 12-month retention and metric-change documentation as grantee reporting items.

3. Score narrative-inclusion language lower when governance authority is absent. Applause is not accountability.

If you are a policymaker:

1. Commission an audit of every workforce program your office funds: how many employ people with lived experience in roles that carry design authority? The answer will be uncomfortable.

2. Require peer-designed outcome metrics as a condition of state and federal program reauthorization. Not peer-informed. Peer-designed.

3. Change the procurement standard: programs that cannot demonstrate lived-experience authority at the design level should not qualify for public workforce funding.

If you are a program director or workforce operator:

1. Pull your org chart this week. Count every lived-experience role. Ask how many can change a single metric. If the answer is zero, that is your first 30-day deliverable.

2. Give your lived-experience advisory board one metric to own. One protocol to approve or reject. Not four meetings a year. A binding vote.

3. Report the result at 90 days. Not the number of meetings held. The number of design changes made.

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The Design Authority Diagnostic

Here is the three-beat test your organization needs to run before the next board meeting.

Beat 1. Name the gap:

Pull your organizational chart. Identify every role occupied by a person with direct lived experience. Now ask: how many of those roles have the authority to set or modify a program outcome metric? SAMHSA’s National Model Standards for Peer Support Certification (June 2023) recommends peer integration into evaluation and quality improvement. If your lived-experience staff are excluded from both, you are not integrating system intelligence. You are extracting narrative.

Beat 2. Name what the silence means:

If a person with lived experience in your organization cannot point to a single metric, protocol, or design element they changed in the last 12 months, you do not have a design partner. You have a testimonial resource. That is a governance decision, not a gap in your commitment.

Beat 3. Name the design implication:

The organizations producing durable outcomes are embedding lived experience into metric design, budget authority, and program evaluation. Not just service delivery and conference panels. System intelligence was built for the design table your organization has not yet opened.

Thirty days.

That is the window. Pull the org chart. Count the decision-authority roles. Name the gap.

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The Forcing Question

Here is the one question no funder, no workforce board, and no program director is answering:

How many people with lived experience in your organization have influenced a metric, protocol, or design element in the past year?

If you do not have that number, you are not measuring integration.

You are measuring attendance.

Change the metrics. Change the outcomes.

Start this quarter.

Until next time, keep building what they said couldn’t be built.

Khalil Osiris

Author & Founder, Khalil Osiris Consulting | Market Architect, 2Gen Economy Workforce Ecosystem | Fair-Chance Hiring · Household Stability · Workforce Durability | Publisher, The Durability Economy

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References

Altman, D., & Schrag, A. (2025, April). Workforce development policy in the US. Brookings Institution / ERIC (ED674467). https://www.brookings.edu/articles/workforce-development-policy-in-the-us/

Center for Health Care Strategies. (2025, May). Making the case for engaging people with lived experience and expertise in state behavioral health systems. CHCS. https://www.chcs.org/resource/making-the-case-for-engaging-people-with-lived-experience-and-expertise-in-state-behavioral-health-systems/

Council of State Governments Justice Center / C4 Innovations. (2024). Establishing a lived experience advisory panel: Action steps and considerations. CSG Justice Center. https://csgjusticecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Establishing-a-Lived-Experience-Advisory-Panel_508.pdf

Council of State Governments Justice Center / National Reentry Resource Center. (2024, December). Advancing the work of peer support specialists in behavioral health-criminal justice programs. CSG Justice Center. https://nationalreentryresourcecenter.org/resources/advancing-work-peer-support-specialists-behavioral-health-criminal-justice-p

Levine, A., et al. (2025, March). The importance of lived experience: A scoping review on the inclusion of people with lived experience in participatory health research. Health Expectations, 28(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/hex.70205

Nelson, B., et al. (2024, March). Engaging people with lived experiences on community advisory boards in community-based participatory research: A scoping review protocol. BMJ Open, 14(3), e078479. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-078479

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2023, June). National model standards for peer support certification (Publication No. PEP23-10-01-001). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.samhsa.gov/resource/spark/samhsas-national-model-standards-peer-support-certification

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2023). Core competencies for peer workers: Behavioral health. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.samhsa.gov/substance-use/recovery/peer-support-workers/core-competencies

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2023). Participation guidelines for individuals with lived experience and family. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.samhsa.gov/grants/how-to-apply/forms-and-resources/guidelines-lived-experience

About the Author

Khalil Osiris was arrested at 16, turned 17 in jail, and was sentenced to prison, all in 1976. He spent 20 years incarcerated across two sentences, earning both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston University during his second incarceration. He walked out of prison in 1999 and has spent the 27 years since studying the criminal justice and workforce systems from both sides, as a consultant, researcher, and advocate. He founded Khalil Osiris Consulting to build operational blueprints that change the math, for employers, funders, policymakers, and the households that pay when the system gets it wrong.