Lived Experience Design Project

Recognising the vital importance of listening deeply to and collaborating and co-designing with lived experience groups, we champion this approach to empower both our work and that of our stakeholders. We see it as a crucial step in dismantling the stigma and discrimination often faced by individuals with lived experience.

Drawing on lived experiences, we co-design person-centred solutions with our Lived Experience Parent Designers. By becoming grounded in their needs and developing empathy for their experiences, we can surface and translate insights into solutions they want and need.

The Lived Experience Design Project brings together a group of expert birth parents with lived experience of child protection to design policy and reform solutions across early help, family group conferencing and child protection learning and development.

The groundbreaking Voice of Parents project, a first in Victoria, was the catalyst for profiling nine birth parents with lived experience of the child protection system in a design project.

Voice of Parents, supported by philanthropic funding, enabled the Centre to lead the development, testing and refining of lived experience prototypes, including a remuneration package. The Voice of Parents served as the foundation and an evidence base for expanding our parent participation model into an enhanced lived experience design group, currently comprised of six diverse parent designers dedicated to reform projects funded by the Department of Families, Fairness, and Housing.

The Lived Experience Design Project is informed by co-design principles and frameworks, Voice of Parents Inclusion Framework and design thinking approaches to produce artefacts that convey the voices and stories of our lived experience designers – our parents.

Through design thinking activities, capacity building, and collaborative methods, the Lived Experience Design project has significantly improved parental understanding of child and family policy and service design. It has amplified co-creation efforts, incorporating lived experiences to advise government policy and increasing parental confidence in co-design approaches.

The project also expanded the Voice of Parents initiative group by 50%, enhanced parent educational and career outcomes, and bolstered the Buddy Support program.

Key initiatives included workshops on creating safe spaces and contributions to the Child Protection Training Program through video resources. It was also presented at the 2022 Roadmap Implementation Ministerial Group Meeting.