The Lived Experience Library

The Lived Experience Library is a curated digital space where individual narratives meet systemic insights.

By documenting diverse human stories, we provide a foundation for meaningful change, ensuring that inclusion is rooted in real-world reality rather than abstract concepts.

Our goal is to bridge the gap between policy and people, making trauma and lived experience-informed practice an accessible standard for every organisation.

Funders and Partners

How you can help

The Setu CIC is seeking grant funders, commissioners and strategic partners to help develop and test the Lived Experience Library: a distinctive, accessible and community-led digital archive of intersectional stories from marginalised and under-represented people.

Funding will enable us to build the ethical, technical and community infrastructure needed to turn lived experience into a trusted resource for fairer policy, funding, research, services and organisational decisions.

Combining lived experience with more than fifty years of expertise in inclusion, organisational change, leadership, mental health and accessibility, we aim to create a trusted UK resource with international relevance that helps funders, policymakers, researchers and organisations make fairer, better-informed decisions.

The Lived Experience Library - a unique digital archive learning resource to enable change

Our project

The need

Decisions affecting marginalised communities are too often made without sustained access to the knowledge of the people most affected.

Although lived experience may be gathered through short-term consultations or extractive research, it can lose its context, disappear when a project ends and create little lasting benefit for contributors or their communities.

This leaves funders, policymakers and service leaders without the depth of evidence they need, while communities are repeatedly asked to share experiences without seeing how that knowledge influenced change.

How the Library will change this

The Lived Experience Library is being designed as a different model: a trusted, evolving evidence base created with communities rather than about them.

It will preserve the context around people’s stories, give contributors greater agency over how their knowledge is represented and used, and create a responsible route for lived experience to inform funding, policy, research, services and organisational change.

What we are developing

The Library will bring together intersectional life stories in accessible formats, with contributors involved in how their knowledge is collected, described, shared and used.

It is intended to support funders, policymakers, educators, researchers, practitioners and organisational leaders who need richer evidence to design inclusive services, allocate resources responsibly and understand experiences beyond their own.

What funding will enable

Funding will enable the Library to move from concept to a tested and investable model through ethical co-design with communities and founding contributors.

Ethical designing with communities and founding contributors
Accessible digital-platform research, design and development
Safeguarding, consent, governance and data-protection frameworks
Fair approaches to contributor recognition and community benefit
Pilot story collection, testing and evaluation
Partnership development and routes for responsible use by decision-makers

How we will develop this

We will develop the Library in phases, beginning with inclusive lived experience-led design, governance and technical discovery before piloting story collection and responsible use with contributors and partners.

Learning from each phase will shape the next, with evaluation focused on contributor experience, accessibility, ethical practice, partner use and evidence of influence on decisions.

Intended outcomes

Marginalised and under-represented contributors have greater agency over how their knowledge is collected, represented, shared and used, evidenced through agreed consent processes, contributor feedback and participation in governance and design.
Funders and decision-makers gain access to richer, contextual lived-experience evidence and can demonstrate how that evidence has informed funding priorities, programme design or organisational decisions.
Policy, services and funding decisions are better informed by intersectional lived experience, with participating partners recording where community evidence has changed priorities, resource allocation, service design or delivery.
Participating communities benefit through contributor recognition, accessible learning, opportunities to shape the Library and clearer routes to influence the institutions using their knowledge.
A tested, ethical and accessible model is created for responsible UK use and international learning.

Why The Setu CIC

The Setu CIC combines more than fifty years of professional experience across EDI, belonging, culture change, organisational development, public services, mental health, suicide prevention, disability and LGBTQ+ health inclusion with direct lived experience of exclusion and institutional barriers.

Our community-interest structure keeps social purpose, accessibility and public benefit at the centre of development.

We connect community knowledge with the practical realities of leadership, commissioning and organisational change.

Support Our Mission

We are looking for founding funders and strategic partners to help move the Lived Experience Library from concept to a tested, ethical and investable model. Support at this stage will establish the foundations of the Library and ensure that communities shape its design from the outset—not after the key decisions have already been made.

We welcome grant funding for the designing, contributor engagement, accessible technology, safeguarding and consent systems, governance, pilot story collection, evaluation and partnership development. We also welcome pilot collaborators, diverse creators, research and evaluation partners, accessibility and digital specialists, and responsible connections to communities and future users.

Founding partners will help shape a distinctive community-led solution with UK-wide public benefit and potential for international learning. They will contribute to a practical model for bringing intersectional lived experience into funding, policy, research, service design and organisational decisions—and help demonstrate how community knowledge can lead to visible change.

Start a funding or partnership conversation today.

If your priorities include equity, community voice, systems change, accessible innovation or better evidence for decision-making, contact The Setu CIC to discuss funding fit, due diligence, pilot opportunities and becoming a founding partner.

Discuss Funding and Partnerships