When we first began the Payment for Involvement Learning Community, it wasn’t just about policy, it was about fairness, dignity, and trust. For years, we’d seen how organisations struggled to pay people with lived experience for their contributions. Many organisations, fearful of disrupting people's benefits or getting entangled in bureaucracy, often resort to giving vouchers or gifts instead of proper payment. From a social justice perspective, we see this a patronising and tokenistic approach, failing to honour the value of someone's experience.
With support from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Lankelly Chase, we set out to change that. Our role at the Social Change Agency was to create a Payment for Involvement handbook and, to inform its development, to convene a learning community as a place to explore key themes and issues and test out approaches.
From the start, our focus was simple but ambitious: to make fair payment for involvement by people with lived experience, standard practice. We wanted to create a space where organisations could explore the barriers, share what works, and build solutions together.
At first, I imagined a small network with maybe eight or nine organisations joining forces. But the response was overwhelming and around 140 organisations came forward - spanning universities, local authorities, charities, funders - each one grappling with similar challenges and ready to learn. That energy gave the community its momentum, and before long, we’d built a vibrant, supportive space that met three or four times a year online with around 20 participants. Those meetings became a kind of shared breathing space, where people could be honest about their experiences, ask hard questions, and learn from one another without judgement.
As the learning community grew, so did our impact. Members shared their internal payment policies so we could review them collectively and identify what fair practice could look like, helping inform our own Payment for Involvement Policy. The Payment for Involvement Playbook we developed is filled with real-world advice and examples from the community and we also created a toolkit for job centres to help navigate the complexities of paying people receiving welfare and benefits. The Playbook has had over 1,300 downloads and the toolkit more than 600 downloads so far, which shows how much appetite there is for this work. We also invited members to share their reflections publicly, through blogs and podcasts, amplifying both funder perspectives and the voices of people with lived experience. One of the most popular podcasts features Rachel Smith, Director of Make Shift, speaking about trust and equity, which captures the heart of what the collaboration is about.
We started as a group of individuals and organisations frustrated by the system, but we ended up helping to shift the culture around how lived experience is recognised and rewarded.
What made the community special was how real it felt - passionate people trying to do better. When someone shared a challenge, others leaned in with support. That openness allowed us to experiment quickly, test ideas, and iterate together. It reminded us that learning doesn’t need to be complicated - it just needs skilled facilitation, space and trust. Having a broad membership and the DWP on board as a key stakeholder also added to the scale and potential influence of the work.
Being recognised and promoted by ACF's Funders Collaborative Hub was transformative and a key turning point. The Hub is an excellent resource, and their support helped us share our learning with a wider network and gave the project greater visibility. It also enhanced our credibility and undoubtedly helped us reach more funders. Perhaps most significantly, it helped affirm that what we were doing mattered for many people and for the broader ecosystem of funders and practitioners trying to shift culture around lived experience.
Of course, there have been challenges. Our biggest hurdle has been sustainability. Even though demand for the community remained high, we struggled to secure ongoing funding to keep it going - and as a payment for involvement piece of work, being paid felt essential on principle. On reflection, setting up a simple online space might have helped us continue connecting informally.
Looking back, what I cherish most about the Learning Community is how it showed what’s possible when people come together around shared values. We started as a group of individuals and organisations frustrated by the system, but we ended up helping to shift the culture around how lived experience is recognised and rewarded.
We now see the outputs from the work pop up everywhere and have seen real changes since we started out. More policies recognise lived experience as a form of labour, not charity. More funders are paying people properly for their expertise, and more people are talking about trust, transparency, and equity as non-negotiables. As Social Change Nest, we've had an increase in people asking us help co-produce their policies.
Even though the community itself has ended, its spirit lives on in the relationships we built, the resources and tools we created, and the small but meaningful shifts happening across the sector. We turned a shared frustration into a collaborative movement that continues to ripple outwards - quietly, but powerfully.
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