The Lived Experience Design Project brings together a group of expert birth parents with lived experience of child protection to design policy and reform solutions across early help, family group conferencing and child protection learning and development.

The Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare acknowledges that deeply listening, collaborating and co-designing with lived experience groups is critical to the success of our work and that of our stakeholders. Ultimately, we believe it an essential step to breaking down stigma and discrimination that people with lived experience often face.

The Voice of Parents project, a first in Victoria was the catalyst for profiling nine birth parents with lived experience of the child protection system in a design project. The project, funded by philanthropy enabled the Centre to lead developing, testing and refining lived experience prototypes inclusive of a remuneration package. The Voice of Parents project provided strong foundations and an evidence-base to expand our parent participation model to form an enhanced lived experience design group currently consists of six diverse parent designers focusing on reform projects currently funded by the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing.

Our lived experience design program is informed by co-design principles and frameworks, Voice of Parents’ Inclusion Framework and design thinking approaches to produce artefacts that visually and verbally share the voice and story of lived experience designers, our parents.