Exploring the Role of Lived Experts in Homelessness Governance: Mapping the Canadian Context


Jayne Malenfant, McGill University

Increasingly, across policy spaces, frontline services, advocacy groups, and research on homelessness, lived experiences of housing precarity are sought to inform decision-making, responses, and solutions. Recent housing rights legislation in Canada, the National Housing Strategy, further calls for the ongoing and participatory engagement of those directly impacted by housing rights violations in the creation of responses (Levac et al., 2022). Despite this increasing recognition of the value of lived experience, many groups struggle to foster equitable, ongoing, and meaningful relationships with people who are directly impacted by housing rights violations. People with firsthand experience can be integral to understanding how homelessness happens and what interventions are needed to effectively address it. Still, in spaces of governance and decision-making across federal, provincial, municipal and organizational contexts, lived experts remain underrepresented, and engagement is often limited to token positions or “make-work” roles that are not implicated in governance (Ilyniak, 2022). Lived experts are rarely in positions to make decisions or shape the way housing services, policy, or practice are governed. Led by a researcher with lived experience of housing precarity, this paper presents ethnographic research undertaken with over 20 lived experts who have worked as advisors, peer support staff, community researchers, and advocates across Turtle Island to better understand how we can engage services users and people with lived experience in our programming and policies. Themes drawing from the experiences of those navigating spaces policy, advocacy, service provision and research spaces will be presented, with the aim of illuminating how direct knowledge of systems, physical spaces, resources and trjaectories impacting housing and homelessness are engaged in service of the housing and homelessness sector. Relationships related to decision-making and hierarchies of knowledge in this sector—often positioning lived knowledges as simultaneously valuable and anecdotal—will be explored. In particular, mobilizing Institutional Ethnographic approaches (Smith, 1990), the paper will examine texts (e.g. government and service providers’ policies) that organize the governance of housing and homelessness spaces in so-called Canada, beginning in the work of those with lived and living experiences of homelessness, governance is structured in ways that draw from, ignore, or abstract the realities of those navigating housing precarity. Key barriers outlined by participants and policy analysis—particularly a lack of access to stable roles in organizations, feelings of ongoing consultation with little access to (or understanding of) decision-making structures, and assumptions that lived experts do not (or cannot) hold the skills or knowledge to contribute to governance—will be explored, in order to provide tangible ways lived expertise may be better mobilized to address housing rights. The work will also speak to how making visible the activist roots of by-us-for-us organizing (Nelson, 2020), intersectionality, and anti-oppression can be key part sof meaningful ways of fostering lived experience and community leadership of solutions to homelessness, both in local contexts and broadly.

This paper will be presented at the following session: