Volunteer Management Conference, Volunteering England

24–25 March 2010, University of Warwick Conference

Rich Watts
Director of Policy & Development, ECDP

Introduction

I wanted to talk briefly about what we call the “Lived Experience” of disabled
and older people at ECDP and how we are using this to build a higher profile
for our volunteering work, both internally and externally.

About ECDP

Very briefly, it is useful to provide some background to ECDP. We are a user-

led organisation and our vision is to enhance the everyday lives of disabled
people in Essex and beyond. We have just over 3,500 clients for whom we
provide a range of support services for. We also have 1,540 members and our
work covers all impairment groups – for example, just over 22% of our
members have a learning disability and just under 10% have a mental health
condition.

We have just over 120 current and potential volunteers across all of our
volunteering projects. These range from people representing the views of
disabled people through us to various public sector organisations in their local
communities, through to the project kindly funded by Volunteering England –
the Independent Visitors Scheme.
Under this project, both disabled and non-disabled volunteers support a
disabled ‘client’ to achieve a personal goal. This could be anything from
visiting the shops regularly to completing an Open University degree.

ECDP as a support services organisation

I think it’s fair to say that ECDP was until last year perceived only as an
organisation for people with Direct Payments or Personal Budgets. It was a
great irony for me that the very thing that makes ECDP unique as an
organisation – that we are led by our users and that we use the everyday lived
experiences of people to inform everything we do – was precisely the thing
that the wider community didn’t recognise us for.

I think there was also a view internally – both amongst staff and amongst
managers – that the support services we provide were a higher priority,
particularly since they had a significant amount of staff and money attached to
them, compared to our volunteering-based work. Whereas our services
clearly made a tangible difference to people’s lives, colleagues often didn’t
know what difference our volunteering work made.

Using lived experience

So we needed to think about how to overcome this perception of our

volunteering work – both internally and externally – as being somehow ‘lesser’
than the other things we do.

The vehicle we used to do this was lived experience.

“Lived experience” represents the everyday lives of disabled people. It is the

experience that people develop from living with and managing their
impairments on a day-to-day basis and the attitudes, reactions and barriers
they encounter in society.
Lived experience brings a unique perspective that can, if it’s channelled well,
ultimately have a positive experience – not just for an individual themselves
but for other individuals and organisations they come into contact with.

At ECDP, we fundamentally recognised the importance of lived experience.

We also spotted that it was our volunteering projects – particularly where we
had disabled people as volunteers supporting disabled people as clients –
where lived experience was so clearly already making a difference.

A great example is a lady called Susan. She had spent years being
housebound and isolated because of her impairment, and with it lost her
confidence and self esteem. After becoming involved as a client with the
Independent Visitors Scheme, Susan regained her confidence through joining
a local single parent group and attending a college course. After she
completed her course, she felt confident enough to become a volunteer
herself and has since become an Independent Visitor for two clients of her
own.

Thus, fundamentally, Susan is now using her own lived experience to provide
support to someone else who is in a similar situation.

Benefits of the lived experience approach

Within ECDP, lived experience – and the peer support that it often gives rise
to – became a powerful concept that articulated the difference our
volunteering work was making in people’s lives.

And this gave rise to a number of benefits.

Internally, it meant that many of our staff who were using their own lived
experience as disabled people to provide advice and support to individuals
with social care needs could see that our volunteering work was in exactly the
same business. And this meant that some of our staff decided to become
volunteers themselves, with all the benefits that come with that, particularly in
terms of breaking down the silo mentality within that occasionally exists in the
organisation.

And talking about it being the same kind of business, I would actually go
further and argue that our volunteering work is richer because it moves people
beyond the realms only of social care and having their support needs met to
achieving wider Independent Living goals around transport, education,
employment, a social life and so on. This had a knock-on benefit in terms of
how people – particularly those in local government – perceived ECDP, and
enabled us to build strong arguments for the ‘added value’ we provide as a
user-led organisation to our contracted work. In turn, this meant that
volunteering became an integral part of the overall success of ECDP – not
just some fluffy stuff that happens on the side.

Externally, it allowed us to create the stories which we could share with both
disabled and non-disabled people to encourage them to get involved in our
volunteering work. This was useful not only in terms of attracting individuals to
out work, but also in developing that crucial hook that means local press were
interested in the stories we were telling.

And from a volunteers’ manager point of view, lived experience also means
that made our volunteering work more sustainable: alongside the new levels
of interest we’ve had from staff within the organisation and people outside of
it, the role of our volunteer coordinators becomes one of encouraging clients
and creating pathways so that they may go on to be volunteers in the future.

Thus, at its heart and alongside all the other benefits which flow from it, lived
experience means that the disabled people who are clients today will be our
volunteers of tomorrow.

Thank you.