Over the past two years we’ve been embedding lived experience into our research and campaign and influencing work.
In 2021 we worked with people with lived experience to develop our 2022-27 strategy ‘Tackling suicide together; here we committed to:
Ensuring the voice of people with experience of suicidal feelings, suicide attempts, self-harm, or bereavement by suicide is central to and shapes all our services, products, campaigns and activities.
Update on our lived experience strategic plan
Our Lived Experience Consultants have been busy over the last six months and we know you’re keen to better understand what we’ve been doing and who we’ve been working with.
It’s taken us much longer than expected to speak to everyone, understand what we’re learning and find a way forwards. This has meant we’ve taken the difficult decision to delay launching the findings and strategy until spring 2025. However, we’re really excited to be able to share what we’ve been up to and what will happen next.
What's happened?
We’ve learnt so much from surveys, interviews and focus groups that we could write a book! This is why we’ve been so quiet – there’s a lot to analyse, understand and inform our decision-making.
Our challenge is to make sense of everything to ensure the knowledge benefits Samaritans and the wider community. We’re drafting a report summarising our findings that’s planned for release early in 2025. At the same time, we’re drawing on your ideas and suggestions to build a five-year implementation plan, which will help us achieve our lived experience principle.
Here’s what we’ve been doing over the past few months:
2023
The project started late in 2023 by speaking with staff at Samaritans’ all staff conference, which a whopping 268 staff attended. This led to six cross-organisational workshops attended by 66 staff members, 11 interviews with senior staff and planning a workshop for staff with lived experience.
April-May 2024
58 people took part in workshops for people with lived experience and shared how they would like to work with Samaritans. We also ran a survey, an analysis of the 266 responses (including initial recommendations) is currently being prepared.
We ran a workshop with staff who have their own lived experience and the findings from this session are being included in the wider staff analysis.
June 2024
Lived experience consultants met face-to-face to review your recommendations, we used these build a work plan. It became clear that we needed a set of core values to guide our work. We drafted an ethos document to support all Samaritans projects involving people with lived experience - hopefully we can share this soon. We also held workshops for other charities to get involved. They were very interested in the approach we’re taking and shared lots of helpful ideas.
We met with Regional Directors to find ways to involve them more in this work, as well as staff based in Scotland and Wales, to hear their views and experiences of involvement work.
August 2024
We reviewed the policies of other charities and insights from our workshops, summarising what we’ve learned from consulting with 37 organisations. We also worked on refining our ethos document, including drafting objectives for the strategy.
September 2024
This was a quieter month as we continued to analyse the data gathered so far - we really wanted to make sure marginalised voices were heard as best as possible and have been analysing data from an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion perspective. We also launched a volunteer survey and were excited to receive 617 responses.
October 2024
We’ve been analysing the volunteer survey results, which contain so much useful information. It’s been very motivating to hear why some people volunteer with us. We also met with our wider working group to plan how to share the strategy and our findings within Samaritans. A senior leader is helping us shape how this strategy will fit into the charity’s future.
What's next
November 2024
We’re planning a workshop to develop and refine the strategy and are excited to speak with staff in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
December 2024
Before we break for Christmas, we’ll be meeting with senior leaders at Samaritans to discuss the work. Their input will help us make connections with projects across the organisation.
2025
We’ll share a report explaining what we learnt from the stakeholders who took part and discuss our proposed strategy with Samaritans Trustees.
We aim to start delivering the strategy from April, but it will take us a bit longer to share it widely. Look out for the launch of the strategy in late spring.