The CLIK Guide is now available. Click here to download a copy!
Background
As recommended by the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence, building a lived experience workforce is a crucial step to provide more responsive support and genuine employment opportunities to victim-survivors. Yet it is necessary to place lived experience in the context of intersectionality to ensure that services meet the needs of communities that face intersecting forms of marginalisation (including LGBTIQA+, First Nations, CALD, socio-economically disadvantaged people and people with disabilities). For services, this involves an examination of who currently holds power within the service, alongside the employment and support of victim-survivors with diverse forms of cultural, lived experience, and identity knowledge.
An intersectional lived experience workforce is therefore an opportunity to build on the existing expertise in the workforce, while uplifting the specific forms of knowledge held by victim-survivors from marginalised communities.
The CLIK Guide
The Cultural, Lived experience and Identity Knowledge (CLIK) guide is a practical resource for services in the family violence and sexual assault sectors. It draws on knowledge from consultation with services, findings from the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence, contemporary research, and first-hand experiences implementing the iHeal Recovery Support Worker model at Drummond Street Services. The guide has four sections:
- Background: Why a lived experience workforce is important for the sector and how it is situated within intersectional practice.
- Readiness: How to engage in organisational readiness through elevating marginalised voices
- Implementation: How to implement and support an intersectional lived experience workforce through:
- drawing on existing diverse lived experience voices in the service
- supported hiring processes for new intersectional lived experience staff
- ongoing training and support for all staff
- evaluation and review of the process and outcomes.
- Resource guide: A collection of templates and examples that can be adapted and utilised in your service context.
Downloadable resources
- CLIK Guide (PDF): The full guide
- CLIK Resource kit (Word): Editable copies of the templates and examples in Section 4 of the CLIK Guide
Training
A launch event and training session was delivered in September 2023. In the session we explored:
- why an intersectional lived experience workforce is important
- a structured approach to readiness and implementation
- experiences and lessons from piloting an intersectional lived experience program (iHeal program)
- discussed how to apply it to diverse service contexts.
Any future training sessions will be listed here.
Contact
If you would like to contact CFRE about any aspect of the CLIK guide, or for enquiries about training and capacity building for your organisation, please contact training@ds.org.au.
