Lived Impact is a non-clinical peer support and education resource. It does not replace medical, psychological or emergency care.
Our Focus
Lived experience is not a story. It's a form of expertise.
We work from a framework that names and legitimises the distinct intelligences lived experience leaders carry — shifting the conversation from "sharing stories" to deploying strategic assets that systems genuinely need.
"The question is not whether people with lived experience have something to contribute. The question is whether systems are designed to receive it."
The Framework
The 5 Intelligences
A framework for understanding what lived experience leaders actually know - and why systems can't afford to operate without it.
Experiential Intelligence
The knowledge that comes from living through systems - navigating housing, mental health, justice, or child protection as a recipient. This intelligence holds what no policy document can capture: the texture of what it actually feels like.
Relational Intelligence
The capacity to build trust across difference - between communities and institutions, between people with power and people without it. Lived experience leaders carry this as a core competency, not a soft skill.
Systems Intelligence
A deep, embodied understanding of how systems actually operate - not as they are designed on paper, but as they are experienced on the ground. This is pattern recognition born from proximity.
Narrative Intelligence
The ability to translate lived experience into language that moves people and shifts systems - to hold complexity without flattening it, and to tell stories that create accountability rather than just sympathy.
Transformative Intelligence
The orientation toward change - not just critique, but vision. Lived experience leaders don't only name what's broken. They carry a clear sense of what better looks like, and the will to build it.
Where We Work
Sector Expertise
Lived Impact works across the human services landscape - wherever systems intersect with people's lives.
Mental health & psychosocial disability
Housing & homelessness
Child protection & family services
Alcohol & other drugs
Criminal justice
Domestic, family & sexual violence
Public health
Disability services
Community services
Ready to put this framework to work?
See how we partner with organisations to embed lived experience intelligence at every level of decision-making.
How We Partner