“Don’t We All Have Lived Experience?” and other curly questions: Organisational readiness and culture change for lived experience and clinical teams

As lived experience roles become embedded across Victoria’s mental health sector, many services are encountering a set of “curly questions” that can be hard to talk about: What counts as lived experience? How do designated lived experience roles differ from clinicians with lived experience? What is lived experience ‘expertise’? How do we best support the mental health of mental health workers, no matter what role they’re in? 

In this interactive session, Big Feels Club will share insights from their Big Feels at Work program (for mental health workers struggling with their own mental health). We’ll introduce a practical lens for thinking about these big questions as organisational readiness and culture change (not just a training gap). And we’ll workshop a funded pilot program concept we’re developing for later this year — inviting feedback to help shape it.

This session is primarily for leaders/decision-makers/people managers (including workforce/OD, people & culture, L&D, governance, and lived experience leaders).

Participants will:

• Identify common “curly questions” and friction points emerging as lived experience work becomes embedded across services. 
• Identify where their organisation currently fits on organisational response to lived experience roles and lived experience across teams
• Explore what an effective response could look like including what conditions make culture work possible. 
• Provide informed feedback on a proposed, funded pilot program design — including what would make it practical, safe, and worth investing in.

Facilitators:

SJ Haywood is co-founder of Big Feels Club. She has worked in mental health and reform for over a decade, including serving on the Expert Advisory Committee to the Royal Commission and as a Senior Consumer Advisor into Victoria’s Mental Health System (2019–2021). She brings a practical focus on culture change and the “unspoken” realities of mental health work.

Graham Panther is co-founder of Big Feels Club and creator of Big Feels at Work, a Victorian Government funded program exploring the realities of mental health work when you have your own lived experience (in both clinical and designated roles). He works with mental health organisations on workforce, culture and collaboration across disciplines.