Engaging People with Lived Experience: Overcoming Barriers and Ensuring Meaningful Involvement
| Thursday, June 5, 2025 |
| 8:40 AM - 9:10 AM |
Overview
Emma Elder, Lived Experience Program Lead at the Black Dog Institute, UNSW
Presenter
Emma Elder
Lived Experience Research and Advisory Network Program Manager
Black Dog Institute
Engaging People with Lived Experience: Overcoming Barriers and Ensuring Meaningful Involvement
Abstract
Despite having co-designed a tailored Lived Experience Engagement Framework, the Black Dog Institute (UNSW) has identified ongoing barriers to effectively partnering with individuals who have lived or are living with mental health challenges, suicide, or self-harm.
Emma Elder, the Lived Experience Program Lead at Black Dog Institute, has been navigating a complex landscape of questions aimed at ensuring that people with lived and living experience are truly central to the planning, design, and delivery of research, research translation, and intervention activities. Key questions include: How do we ensure safe and meaningful engagement? How can we create practical approaches that empower people with lived experience to make key decisions? And how do we ensure we are working with diverse populations?
Through this journey, Emma has gained valuable insights into who is being engaged, the methods of working with different age groups (children, youth, and adults), and how people with lived and living experience can play an integral role in decision-making processes.
In this presentation, Emma will share the lessons learned and discuss the strategies and challenges encountered in the pursuit of engaging people with lived and living experience at the highest possible level within research and intervention projects at the Black Dog Institute.
Key Learnings:
1. What is foundational to ensure lived experience engagement is safe and meaningful
2. How to practically have people partnering with you at a high level of engagement (practical activities)
Emma Elder, the Lived Experience Program Lead at Black Dog Institute, has been navigating a complex landscape of questions aimed at ensuring that people with lived and living experience are truly central to the planning, design, and delivery of research, research translation, and intervention activities. Key questions include: How do we ensure safe and meaningful engagement? How can we create practical approaches that empower people with lived experience to make key decisions? And how do we ensure we are working with diverse populations?
Through this journey, Emma has gained valuable insights into who is being engaged, the methods of working with different age groups (children, youth, and adults), and how people with lived and living experience can play an integral role in decision-making processes.
In this presentation, Emma will share the lessons learned and discuss the strategies and challenges encountered in the pursuit of engaging people with lived and living experience at the highest possible level within research and intervention projects at the Black Dog Institute.
Key Learnings:
1. What is foundational to ensure lived experience engagement is safe and meaningful
2. How to practically have people partnering with you at a high level of engagement (practical activities)
Biography
Emma specialises in supporting researchers and people with lived and/or living experience of mental health challenges, suicide and self-harm in participatory research methods, with an outcome of real-world impact.
Emma supported the relationship between 100+ Lived Experience Advisors and teams working in partnership within 28 research studies and 33 projects across Black Dog Institute in 2024.
Emma was recently involved in the co-development of a bespoke approach to lived experience engagement at Black Dog Institute. She is also a co-author of the Co-Design Kickstarter, a publication co-developed in response to a need for a resource to support meaningful co-design research.
