Summary
On Our Own Terms is a national inquiry into Lived Experience Leadership and the possibilities it creates for social innovation and systems change.
Through in-depth conversations with lived experience and community leaders across Australia, the project creates space for reflection on what it means to lead from lived and living standpoints — including the opportunities this creates, the tensions it surfaces, and the personal and political costs it can carry.
Convened by Morgan Cataldo in collaboration with Robyn Martin, Perrie Ballantyne, Suzi Hayes and Kelsey Dole, the project’s first phase received early-stage funding support from the Paul Ramsay Foundation. Delivered between 2023–2025, it culminated in the On Our Own Terms: Emerging Insights report.
The work seeks to surface insights, challenges and provocations about how Lived Experience Leadership is practised, sustained and often constrained — and what it might take to better support and scaffold this work within systems change efforts.
Why this project matters
There is a groundswell of activity across Australia to increase the involvement of people with lived experience in social and systems change efforts — particularly those with lived experience of historical and contemporary exclusion and marginalisation.
This project builds from the deep historical and foundational advocacy, activism and vision of movements focused on justice and liberation.
People with lived and living experience are making powerful and distinctive contributions to systems change through research, policy development, service design and service delivery — across roles including advocacy, consultancy and peer work.
While this momentum is encouraging, there have been limited opportunities to bring emerging and leading advocates together to listen, reflect and learn from one another’s experiences.
Image credit: Lisette Charlotte & Jess Holdaway
A space for generative conversations
On Our Own Terms creates space for conversations about what practitioners are experiencing within the current landscape of lived experience advocacy and leadership across Australia.
It offers an opportunity to work collaboratively to set a shared vision and agenda for how this practice might continue to develop — and how people might be better supported to play more equitable and meaningful roles in social change.
The project brings together established and emerging leaders with a wide range of lived and living experiences, inviting reflection on what it feels like to participate in, and often be constrained by, the social sector’s efforts to embed lived experience within systems change agendas.
Conversations explore both the power and potential of leading from lived experience, as well as the challenges and personal costs that often accompany this work.
The aim is to better understand how Lived Experience Leadership and partnerships might be supported, developed and sustained in ways that seek to disrupt systemic oppression, move responses forward, and set the conditions for transformation from the root.
The project draws on the insights of leaders who are well known in this space, whose advocacy and wisdom are critical to identifying shared themes — alongside those working deeply within communities and systems whose leadership is less visible but no less consequential.
Together, these perspectives form a rich and multilayered account of the values, practices and conditions shaping Lived Experience Leadership in Australia.
Project team
The project is convened by Morgan Cataldo, in collaboration with:
- Professor Robyn Martin
Associate Dean, Social Work and Human Services, RMIT School of Global, Urban and Social Studies - Associate Lecturer Suzi Hayes
Researcher, Social Work and Human Services, RMIT School of Global, Urban and Social Studies - Perrie Ballantyne
Visiting Fellow, RMIT School of Global, Urban and Social Studies - Kelsey Dole
Visiting Fellow, RMIT School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
The first phase of the project ran from 2023–2025 with early-stage funding support from the Paul Ramsay Foundation. Further phases may be developed in response to preliminary findings.
