Lived-experience leadership & co-production
David Ford
Independent consultant. I build lived-experience groups that last, train the people in them, and hold the rooms where decisions actually get made.
I know what genuine co-production looks like because I’ve sat on both sides of the table.
A decade building the field, and the reason it lands
I founded Expert Link in 2015 and led it for almost a decade as a national organisation, training and supporting people with lived experience of multiple disadvantage to shape policy and improve services, before stepping down as CEO in 2025. Prior to that I founded the National Expert Citizen Group, recruiting representatives from each of the twelve areas involved in the Fulfilling Lives (now Changing Futures) initiative, an eight year, £112 million programme funded by The National Lottery Community Fund. I went on to manage the group through several periods of the programme’s life, and it came to shape lived-experience practice nationally across all twelve sites. I’m an NLP Master Practitioner, trained in EMDR, clinical hypnotherapy, timeline therapy, and in Deep Democracy and Co-Resolve f
This professional grounding sits underneath everything I deliver and is backed by a track record most consultants in this space don’t have. I sat on the Government’s Rough Sleepers Advisory Panel from 2019 to 2025, set up, trained and facilitated the Government’s Lived Experience Advisory Board for MHCLG, and set up, trained and facilitated Westminster City Council’s Lived Experience Advisory Board for two years. I chaired the Government’s Complex Needs roundtable and presented its outcomes to the Rough Sleeping Advisory Panel, informing the 2022 national strategy to end rough sleeping, including through Expert Link, contributing to the policy development behind the strategy’s £200 million Single Homelessness Accommodation Programme. I designed, wrote and delivered a course commissioned for the Chartered Institute of Housing’s Level 3 Certificate in Supporting Homeless People, co-authored Hard Edges: Mapping Severe and Multiple Disadvantage in England, and my contribution to lived-experience research is acknowledged by name in Ita Walsh’s Age 2 to 18 (Wave Trust, 2018). I held trustee roles for twelve years, three years with South London YMCA, followed by nine years with Thames Reach. I have also been internationally recognised for the work that I do, attending Building the Field of Systems Change in Canada, a gathering of 30 of the top international systems change thinkers.
None of that would mean much without the other half of the journey. I use my full story deliberately, not as something dramatic, but as proof that where you start doesn’t decide where you finish. I’ve been through the care system, I’m a veteran, I’ve struggled with mental health, beaten addiction, and been homeless. I share all of it because it means this work resonates whichever direction someone’s coming from, whether that’s a veterans’ organisation, a homelessness service, a recovery programme, or a health provider. I know what genuine co-production looks like because I’ve sat on both sides of the table.
Telling people what to do rarely moves anything
There’s a story I use in training that says more than any definition could. During wartime rationing, a prominent psychologist in America, Kurt Lewin, wanted people to start eating offal, which nobody was keen on. With one group, he stood up and lectured them: here’s why you need to do this, here’s how. With a second group, he did something different, he asked them “What skills have we got? What ideas do we have? What recipes could work?” He left both groups to it. When he came back, 2% of the first group had started eating offal, but in the second group, it was 38%.
Think about that, it’s the whole case for co-production in one story, isn’t it? Telling people what to do rarely moves anything. Asking them to build the answer with you, and meaning it, moves almost everything.
The definition I work to is this: co-production is a strength-based process that equitably involves all stakeholders in the design and delivery of policies and services. It’s not consultation, where people are asked what they think and someone else decides what to do with it. It’s working hand-in-hand, in partnership, in a way that recognises everyone’s strengths and doesn’t need people to be “fixed” before their input counts.
In practice that means I work to three principles:
Not the Chief Exec, not the funder, not the facilitator, which includes me. The wisdom sits within the group collectively.
Not a token seat, but a genuinely equal opportunity to shape what happens.
Not from what’s wrong with people, but from what they’ve actually got to offer, which is usually more than anyone, including themselves, initially realises.
When done properly, this builds something a good consultation exercise never can, real ownership. And when people feel the direction is genuinely theirs, not something done to them, they look after it differently.
“He was also incredibly honest about his own story, which I have a great deal of respect for.”
— Abbie
Strangers on Monday, a working group by Wednesday
Co-production is about groups, and my real strength is getting a room of people who’ve never met each other, who’ve often never been asked to lead anything in their life, and I’ll get them working as a proper group, usually in a matter of days.
If you haven’t already got an existing group you may need to recruit for it. So there are a few ways I do this depending on what’s already there locally. Sometimes it’s through people who are already trusted and connected in a community. They bring people they know, and we build it out from there together. Sometimes it’s open application, which takes longer, but it works, because the act of applying itself does something, it filters out people who aren’t really up for it, and it tells the ones who get in that this is worth taking seriously. And sometimes the best move is pulling together people from smaller groups that already exist, rather than starting from scratch. That’s how we built Westminster City Council’s Lived Experience Advisory Board and the National Expert Citizen Group.
After recruitment what actually makes a group last comes down to three things: ownership, accountability, and trust. I talk about those three a lot. But you can’t just tell a group “right, you need ownership now.” That’s not how it works. What you actually need to do is get people to believe they’ve got something worth contributing in the first place. A lot of the people I work with have spent years being told, one way or another, that what they know doesn’t count as real knowledge. So before any group gets anywhere near strategy or structure, I spend some time just on them as people, getting them to see the skills and strengths they’ve already got, that have usually been buried under whatever label’s been stuck on them. This is not a “sounds nice but….” this is a crucial part of building a group. Everything else, the ownership, the trust, all of it comes from that, not the other way round. Skip it, and none of the structure holds up. Get it right, and I’ve had groups who were strangers three days ago calling themselves a family by the end.
Once the foundation is solid you then get to build and develop the group as it sees fit: governing documents that include membership, values, purpose, meetings, meeting etiquette, and leadership. Training to develop individuals within the group or the group as a collective, including facilitation skills, peer research, influencing, storytelling (who doesn’t like a good story with a powerful message), co-production, communication and more.
Belief first, technique second
One of the greatest gifts that you can give another person is belief and hope. Belief in themselves, belief that they can become the person that they truly are, achieve their ambitions and realise their purpose, giving them genuine hope for their future. The greatest gift that you will ever receive is to watch that person grow and flourish, just ask any parent. As parents we want the best for our children. We want them to grow and flourish; we want them to become and do better than us. For this we use all our wisdom and our experience to guide them, we share our knowledge in the hope that they will reach their full potential.
Technical training is generally easier to deliver, but getting people to believe in themselves, that they are worthy and full of skills and talent is so much harder. But I genuinely believe in the potential of all people, regardless of their journey. That belief underpins all of the training that I deliver, whether that is training in co-production, research, developing a group or delivering personal development sessions.
I treat my training just like that, albeit short term in comparison. I have a very personal commitment that “if you enter my world, you leave a better human being than when you arrived.”
This commitment guides and drives me to be the best that I can be so that in turn, you can too.
Holding the room, whoever is in it
I can hold a room, doesn’t matter how mixed it is, different languages, different journeys, people with genuinely complex needs, people who’ve got every reason to be angry or shut down before they even sit down. I’ve done it chairing a government roundtable on complex needs, and I’ve done it with people who were in a detention centre a few days before, I’ve done it with whole organisations, trustees down to beneficiaries. In every instance, everyone gets an equitable seat at the table.
Doing that takes skill, but I have trained in Neuro Linguistic Programming, Deep Democracy and Co-Resolve. Using these skills, and more, allows us to move beyond the stock answers, the safe versions and the things people think you want to hear and get to what’s underneath it. The further down you get, the more honest the room gets, and the more honest it gets, the more chance there is of anything actually changing. It also means people leave having genuinely been heard, rather than walking out thinking the decision was already made before they sat down, and we all know how that feels don’t we?
A lot of it’s what you do before anyone even walks in such as knowing the room, knowing the subject, getting yourself in the right headspace. Then it’s setting the tone at the start, everyone agrees how the room’s going to work, different ways of speaking are fine here, honesty is expected. From there it’s about knowing where a group’s limits are and not pushing past them. And asking questions, because a good question does more work than any statement, it can move things from what someone assumes to what’s actually true. Reading the room, naming the thing that is sat just below the surface in a way that allows discussion around it. All of these lead to a place of honesty, a place where real change can come from. Think about it, how many meetings have you walked out of where the real questions weren’t answered and the change was minimal at best?
I teach all of this too, trained people who’d never stood up in front of a group in their life to run their own successful meetings with some going on to chair a group themselves.
“The training has given me the tools to manage power dynamics and encourage more open participation.”
— Jim
Working with leaders so the group can run without me
I’m a good listener, or so I have been told and I know that sounds like a throwaway line, but it isn’t. Most people aren’t, not properly, and it’s the whole foundation of this part of the work. How many times have you thought through your answer or response before the person speaking has finished… often I suspect.
I qualified as a therapist back in 2005, practising as a hypnotherapist for around three years, and trained as an NLP Master Pr Both taught me the same basic thing, the answer someone needs is usually already in them somewhere, and your job isn’t necessarily to hand them a solution, it’s to ask the question that gets them to it themselves.
I regularly work with leads or senior management on an individual basis, and sometimes in small groups from the same organisation, over a longer period, filling in the knowledge gaps when required to but importantly convening the exploratory space to develop comprehensive and sustainable co-production strategies.
I do the same one-to-one coaching and mentoring with a group lead or facilitator over time, so the group can eventually run on its own without me in the room. A great facilitator means that groups can carry on being properly supported from within, long after my time with them ended.
It’s not complicated, it shouldn’t be. Sit with someone properly, ask the right question at the right moment, and don’t rush in with your own answer before they’ve found theirs.
And then sometimes it’s just being there, at hand, so if things get a bit challenging, which they can, someone is there who’s faced those challenges before. Someone who gives you the confidence to make the decisions that you need to make.
Seven courses, and one built for you
Incredible You & Incredible Us
This is the foundation everything else builds on. The first two days are personal development and early group formation: people check in and share why they’re there, learn how the way they talk to themselves shapes how they show up for others, start recognising skills and strengths in themselves that have usually been buried under a label, and get basic facilitation grounding which is often the first time anyone’s had the confidence to speak in front of a group. The third day takes the group from individuals to a collective: agreeing shared values and purpose and drafting a first working terms of reference that captures what’s already emerged rather than imposing something from outside.
“I now understand how to create equality in meetings, making everyone feel valued.”
— Abi
Storytelling to Influence
Most people are only ever asked to “share” their story, which usually just reduces them to their trauma. This is different: understanding the full range of what actually influences people including how relationship-building can be more influential than marches or petitions; the structure of a story that moves someone, and how to stay in control of what you share and when, rather than giving away the whole thing at once.
“The session was amazing and really informative. It has inspired us to reform our internal stories process.”
— Amy
Facilitator Training
A deeper follow-on from the basic facilitation grounding in Incredible You: how to run a room, manage group dynamics, and hold a meeting with confidence. Useful for emerging group leads and for anyone likely to end up chairing a meeting with multiple stakeholders in the room.
Peer Research
A properly trained, ethical approach to research, not an informal chat written up afterwards. Covers why peer research matters, interview skills, safeguarding for both interviewer and interviewee, and data protection. Done properly, robust enough to stand as real evidence for whatever change the group is arguing for. This course can be built around a pre-existing line of enquiry or idea that needs qualitative research carried out by community peers.
Nosce
A deeper personal development course covering my six key principles for success: Communication, Honesty, Skills, Values, Purpose and Outcomes, with practical strategies for actually putting it into practice rather than just talking about it. Nosce sits alongside a wider body of work I’m building under the same name — more on that soon.
Co-production: The Essential Nuts and Bolts
The knowledge base every organisation needs: what co-production actually is, why it matters, the obligations involved, the common barriers, and, critically, how to gather evidence of the co-production you’re already doing. Deliverable as a single day or broken into shorter online sessions.
Bespoke training
Where a genuine gap exists that none of the above quite covers, I’ll design for it rather than force-fitting an existing course. Past examples include bespoke communications training on how frontline staff talk to service users.
What the work produces
Anonymised pending client permission. Named versions will replace these.
From coaching to a self-governing group
A refugee and migrant support centre had good instincts around involving clients, but hadn’t yet moved from informal consultation to structured co-production. Over six monthly coaching sessions with the CEO and senior staff, I worked through a guided-discovery approach rather than handing down solutions, helping the team co-create a client survey with clients rather than about them, identify natural leaders within their client base, and start incorporating client voices directly into fundraising, including one client representing the organisation at a local funding panel.
A year later, they brought me back to turn that groundwork into an actual Client Advisory Group. Over three full days, eleven current and former clients at various stages of the asylum and immigration journey, several without English as a first language, went through my training programme. By the end of day two, quieter members who’d never spoken in a group before were visibly leading. By day three, the group had agreed its own values and purpose, drafted its own Terms of Reference, and elected its first Chair and Co-Chair, both trained in facilitation over the preceding two days.
The final half hour was handed entirely to the new Chair, who facilitated the group’s own feedback session rather than me doing it for them, which was a deliberate test of whether the group could stand on its own; it passed. Participants described the experience as leaving them “growing with knowledge.” By day three, the group had started calling themselves a family, not as a figure of speech, but in practice: organising lunch for each other, quietly catching latecomers up on what they’d missed, without anyone asking them to.
A further programme of work with the group begins later in 2026.
Building a citywide lived experience network
A regional partner involved in delivering a government-funded programme to reduce homelessness and multiple disadvantage recognised its work wasn’t yet genuinely including the people it was meant to serve. They wanted lived experience built into the city’s approach from the ground up, not added as an afterthought.
A wide-ranging programme of support and training started with two open training days on the Essential Nuts and Bolts of co-production. This was attended by around fifty people from across the city, including commissioners, public health officials, staff from the lead partner organisation, and a range of smaller charities, alongside some people with lived experience. Rather than working with one organisation, this set out what co-production actually meant for the whole system.
From there, a core group of people with lived experience of homelessness, addiction, mental illness and the criminal justice system were brought together, and to be honest, not everyone wanted to be there at first, and building trust took real work. Over the following two years, I delivered the full foundation programme, followed by storytelling training, facilitator training, and peer research training, alongside intensive one-to-one coaching for the group’s coordinator throughout.
The group grew into a genuine collective, and its reach extended well beyond training days. Members contributed directly to a major regional research project examining people’s experiences of ambulance services while sleeping rough, sharing their own experiences and shaping the report’s findings. The final report made 31 recommendations, all adopted by the ambulance trust’s board. Two citywide conference events brought the collective’s work to a much wider audience.
What came out of it was a self-sustaining Lived Experience Collective, still active, that has gone on to attract further funding and opportunities in its own right, giving proof that the model doesn’t just produce a good training day, it builds something that keeps generating impact long after the programme ends.
In their own words
“Thank you again for doing the trauma event. But more than that, thank you for being who you are. You create an environment wherever you go that exudes acceptance and love. I don’t know if you know just how much good that does for the people around you. Coproduction is the only way we’ll end homelessness and the trauma it causes. Keep going.”
“It highlights the importance of co-production and the case studies and examples are excellent. It reinforced my commitment to patient centred care and developing that further.”
— Carolyn
“I feel more confident now in sharing my story and using it to influence change.”
— Ian
“It was very informative and insightful. I also enjoyed the presenter sharing his story. His illustrations were also thought provoking.”
— Cicily
Get in touch
Tell me what you’re trying to build and where it’s stuck. If I’m not the right person, I’ll say so.
david@davidford.co