ABOUT US
Baljeet Sandhu, MBE
CEO, Centre for Knowledge Equity
UK human rights lawyer, educator and pioneer of the global ‘knowledge equity’ movement.
She has designed and developed successful systems-led models of practice in the UK legal, social and investment sectors and is a global thought leader on the value and power of lived experience in social impact work.
As a Yale World Fellow, Baljeet supported the development of the Tsai Centre for Innovative Thinking at Yale (CITY), launched in 2017 to serve Yale students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines seeking innovative ways to solve real-world problems.
In 2018, she launched the Knowledge Equity Initiative at Yale University, a ground-breaking research, education and practice hub exploring the value of both lived and learned experience in systems change, innovation and entrepreneurship. The initiative supported student entrepreneurs and innovators and established cross-disciplinary knowledge exchanges and learning ecosystems to connect local, national and global change-making strategies to understand the value of lived experience in systems practice.
Her work also included the design of the Neighbors in Residence Fellowship at Yale, as well as the critical innovation fund.
Awards
- UK Young Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year in 2011
- UK Clore Social Leadership fellow
- Fellow of the Vital Voices Female Global Leaders Partnership
- DVF International Award during the Women in the World Conference at the United Nations in April 2017.
Knowledge equity for systems change – Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship
Equitable Leadership – BBC Sounds
Sangita Myska meets Baljeet Sandhu MBE, who believes ‘knowledge equity’ can make policy-making more progressive.
Is redefining expertise and placing a true value on the lived experience a good way to think out of the box about the complex problems we face? Are we stifling human ingenuity by limiting decision-making powers to so few?
Contributors include:
Tracey Herrington, manager of Thrive Teeside, a community-led anti-poverty charity that campaigns to put lived experience at the heart of policy-making.
Lord David Willetts, president of the Resolution Foundation and former Minister for Universities and Science.
Michele Wucker, strategist and author of The Gray Rhino and You Are What You Risk: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World.
Opening keynote speech – NSUN Members’ Event and Annual General Meeting 2020, 24th November
Lived Experience Leadership – Rebooting the DNA of Leadership
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
We’re in a time where it’s a world of division; building walls and barriers
and the continued oppression and marginalisation of people and their ” views. As a sector focusing on social good isn’t it our role, our obligation – regardless of what government is in power – to unite and bring together all members of society to create opportunities that sustain and strengthen us all.
— Interviewee1
We’re living in a divided world.1 Divided by achieved significant victories in giving agency to backgrounds, experiences, cultures, behaviours people with lived experience (PWLEx) in society, and world views. Rising inequalities threaten our recognition, celebration and investment in LEx society and a sense of hopelessness pervades social leaders has been long neglected. LEx leaders have sector discussions about the future. At the same limited visibility and little access to opportunity,
time, optimism for the future is flourishing across communities directly impacted by social inequities and a call for connected wisdom and visions of shared leadership is emerging.
Every day across the UK and beyond, people with direct, first-hand experience of social issues—or ‘lived experience’2—are taking up change-making and leadership roles to address the unique needs, challenges and injustices their communities face. These leaders are affirming and building upon the remarkable work of many community and grassroots leaders and activists who came before them.
Today, in recognition and respect of the varying and complex journeys, trajectories and models of leadership that have emerged in these evolving communities, the notion of Lived Experience Leadership is developed and explored in this report. This report shines a light through the prism of this new leadership framework by drawing on findings from 30 in-depth interviews and surveys completed by Lived Experience Leaders (LEx leaders). It maps, identifies, and explores the complex landscape, reach and presence of Lived Experience Leadership flourishing across UK society.
However, this report also illuminates significant structural, systemic and cultural barriers that hinder, block or inadequately support LEx leaders capacity to thrive. Although, the work of the social sector has resource and support to shape or lead population and systems-level change. Instead, technical expertise and learned knowledge continue to dominate social sector thinking, behaviour and activities. Many LEx leaders feel isolated and disenfranchised, forced to operate outside of existing support structures designed by this dominant culture – feeling side-lined, even rejected, as modern-day social leaders in the social sector.
This report is a call for action. There is a growing need for social purpose organisations to ‘nourish’, repair, reintegrate, and reboot the leadership DNA of the social sector. To invest in targeted, sophisticated and bespoke leadership and development support to help this community of leaders grow, ‘feel welcome’, and reconnect with wider social sector operations.
Diversity and inclusion; social mobility; and addressing power and privilege in our offices have long been topics of discussion in the social sector. But it’s no longer simply a moral imperative for the social sector to listen and act – this report highlights the economic and social imperatives to do so. Supporting the leadership development of LEx leaders will not only build wider community cohesion and strengthen our social good ‘ecosystem’, it will ultimately transform the work of the social sector by generating new social interventions to benefit civil society in a divided, fast-paced, ever-evolving world.
READ THE REPORT
The Value of Lived Experience in Social Change – Report
This report explores if, and how, social purpose organisations in the United Kingdom value lived expertise in social change work. It also looks at what meaningful opportunities, if any, there are for experts by experience to drive and lead social impact work in modern society.
The overarching conclusion is that lived experience continues to have little traction as a core concept in social change work and leadership, despite its proven impact in human history.
There is a glaring shortage of meaningful and equitable opportunities for experts by experience to be involved in the work of the social sector, and there is a pressing need for leadership and organisational development across the wider sector to ensure that social purpose work benefits from all forms of human wisdom, knowledge and expertise. Only then can we begin to remove the pervasive imbalance that currently exists in our social change equilibrium.
It is time to do better and to appreciate the truth at the heart of the social sector – that fundamentally it is people who create social change. It is time to collectively explore, value and celebrate the change-making and leadership capacity that flourishes throughout civic society, including people and communities with lived experience of the social issues we all seek to tackle.
As a starting point, there is an urgent need for universal cross-sector commitment to this broad agenda. I hope that this report will help achieve this and strengthen the case for sustained implementation of changes throughout the social change ecosystem, including the wider social sector.
Building Opportunities for Inclusive Leadership
Stanford Social Innovation Review – Dec. 2016
Are social entrepreneurship education programs excluding those who have directly experienced social problems from working on social change solutions?
History illuminates the power of individuals and communities who have worked to solve the social problems they have directly experienced. Consider the women’s rights movement; the civil rights movement; Alcoholics Anonymous; or the world’s first safe house for women and children, Refuge, set up by a child survivor of domestic violence. We celebrate stories of leaders with “lived experience,” yet today most of the people receiving social innovation education and accessing leadership opportunities within the wider sector are working to solve problems they haven’t experienced. Undeniably, we need all members of society to feel a collective responsibility to create positive change in the world, but it is worth asking: Is the notion of a “social impact career” a privilege only those of us who have benefited from higher education and/or financial opportunity share? Are leadership opportunities within our sector truly inclusive, or are we supporting the reproduction of—or even perpetuating—social and economic inequality?
To explore how the wider social sector cultivates, develops, and evolves its work through the expertise of communities who have experienced the very issues it seeks to tackle, I turned to social sector leaders in the United Kingdom and the United States working across the private, public, nonprofit, funding, and education sectors. My conversations with more than 80 leaders, in a pre-Brexit era, were lively, and the issue was hotly debated. I found that although most people appear to recognize the intrinsic value of working alongside communities with direct experience of social and environmental issues, many were reticent or apprehensive about including these so-called “beneficiaries” in their organizations’ leadership. Many reported little, or no, awareness of people or communities with lived experience who are leading change in their field. Other conversations sparked discussions about the need to address “heropreneurship”—the sector’s focus on the single, heroic entrepreneur—and a concern about the elite seeking to impose their solutions on others. Overall, an opportunity clearly emerged for social impact educators to better understand the value of lived experience and the benefits of “apprenticing with,” versus “parachuting into,” a problem before launching social impact ventures.
Inspired by leaders who vehemently challenged my enquiry, I decided to interview 12 UK and US funders as a next step, in the hope that their strategic viewpoints would help map the “value” the social sector placed on lived experience and how we currently give those who have lived experience agency within the workings of our sector. Findings from my research have been profound, including debate around the explicit and implicit bias that engulfs the wider sector and the “acceptable” face of leadership we’ve created within our realms. However, below are two findings from my research that I feel are especially important for social impact educators to recognize: