Download document: Our Journey to Embedding Lived Experience at Samaritans FINAL
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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 2022-29 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.
How we’ve developed our lived experience plan
Our work to co-develop our lived experience plan began in Summer 2023, when 4 lived experience consultants were recruited to deliver this piece of work with staff at Samaritans. They were recruited based on their lived experience of suicide and self harm and for their professional expertise.
Since then, the lived experience consultants have been busy speaking to a range of people, including people with lived experience, Samaritans staff and volunteers, and other stakeholders working in the field. They have compiled extensive learnings and insights, both from within Samaritans and from the external world. In total, they heard over 1,300 voices.
We’re so grateful to all the people who have spoken to us and have helped turn this strategic plan into a reality!
Below, you can see a summary of the co-design timeline.
"Our Lived Experience Plan will transform the way in which Samaritans thinks, feels and behaves. It will help the charity's decision-making, meaning we will be able to better understand and respond to those in need. Ultimately, all this will bring hope to people like me. I am excited to see what the future of lived experience involvement at Samaritans holds!”
Lived Experience Consultant
Our journey to embedding lived experience
We are so excited to share another update on our progress and where we are. Over the last few months, we’ve analysed everything we’ve learnt from everyone we spoke to.
Our summary report, “Our journey to embedding lived experience: what we learnt and where we are going next” is now available - see below.
It maps out the exciting journey we’ve been on, they key insights we've gathered, and what we’ve learnt from each group we met!
Our Ambition
We have drafted a collective ambition based on everyone's ideas for lived experience at Samaritans:
“To transform suicide prevention through genuine, meaningful partnerships with people with lived experience, creating positive change together.”
We plan to achieve this by:
- Working alongside people with lived experience to shape decision-making.
- Building an inclusive culture where staff and people with lived experience work together as equal partners, supported by clear systems and processes.
Our goals
We have come up with a set of ambitious goals for the next five years! The goals below emerged from our analysis and discussions. How we achieve these will be detailed in a five-year Lived Experience Plan, see next steps for more details.
- Building foundations: Our staff and volunteers feel confident and supported to involve people with lived experience; while everyone taking part has the training and support they need.
- Working together: People with lived experience help shape our decisions through accessible opportunities to participate and grow.
- Making a difference: We show how lived experience changes our work, ensuring diverse voices influence what we do.
- Changing how we work: Our organisation values lived experience, with people feeling heard and teams seeing involvement as essential to better work.
- Creating lasting change: Lived experience shapes our organisation, helping create an organisation that truly meets people's needs.
Our principles for lived experience
The following principles – which we heard are what matters most to you – will guide everything that we do.
- Inclusive: We will create safe environments that acknowledge your individual needs and remove barriers to involvement.
- Respectful: We will honour both your personal experiences and professional skills, maintaining clear boundaries in all our work together.
- Meaningful: We will involve you in designing projects and making decisions and show how your contributions create real change.
What's next
We are now creating a 5 year plan for Lived Experience at Samaritans, it will include actions the organisation will take to achieve the goals above as well as impact measures to help us understand how we are doing.
We aim to start implementing the plan from April 2025, one of the first steps will be to 'Build foundations' by developing guidance, learning and resources for staff, volunteers and people with lived experience.
It will take us a bit longer to share it on this webpage, we hope to be able to release it in the Summer. Join our Lived Experience Panel to be notified.
We’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who's been involved so far. Your views and ideas shaped everything we’ve done, and we couldn’t have done this without you.
We hope that you will be as enthusiastic as we are about the future of lived experience at Samaritans. We look forward to continuing to work hand in hand with you, to make sure we achieve our mission!