Amaya’s story from Clean Slate client to team lead shows how employing and developing people with lived experience can improve services and create routes into leadership.

As part of its 20th anniversary, Clean Slate asked staff who first came to the organisation as clients to reflect on their experiences. Among them was Amaya, whose story traces a path from receiving support to delivering and leading it. 

Today, she manages the Virtual Support Hub, leading a team of seven. A few years earlier, she was struggling to make ends meet after redundancy and a series of toxic workplaces had left her mentally and financially exhausted.

“There were times when I had to choose between paying a bill and putting food on the table,” she says.

Her experience now sits at the centre of a wider question facing services tackling poverty: what changes when the people who use support are also involved in shaping and delivering it?

Clean Slate’s Lived Experience Inclusion and Involvement Policy attempts to answer that question in practical terms. It treats lived experience as a form of expertise alongside professional knowledge, and sets out how it should influence recruitment, service design and leadership, rather than simply communications.

When help does not land

Amaya’s first reaction to support was not gratitude, but frustration.When her Clean Slate support worker suggested looking at budgeting, she remembers thinking: “I don’t have any money to budget.”

“It felt accusatory, as though I was not managing my money properly.”

The advice itself was not wrong, but the framing did not match her reality. The problem was not overspending. It was that her income did not cover her essential costs.

Over a series of sessions, that perception shifted. Her support worker, Larissa, helped her access supermarket vouchers and identify savings, including a social tariff that reduced one bill from around £45 to £20 a month.

What changed the experience was Larissa’s approach. She listened, took time to understand what Amaya was dealing with and did not treat her circumstances as a personal failure.

“After consecutive sessions, I could see that it was not about blaming me,” Amaya says. “It was about understanding my situation and finding practical ways forward.”

Her response points to a familiar gap in services. Tools and guidance may be technically sound, but they can still alienate the people they are intended to help if they appear to locate the problem in individual behaviour rather than structural pressure.

Clean Slate’s Lived Experiences policy tries to build that understanding into the organisation, rather than leaving it to individual instinct. People with lived experience are involved in service design and delivery, while Peer Workers are trained and supported to combine personal insight with professional practice. 

The space to become ready

Once immediate pressures eased, Amaya began thinking about work again. She applied for a role at Clean Slate, but did not get it. She entered instead as a Peer Worker, a step she now sees as essential.

“It gave me the chance to build confidence, learn the service from the inside, and understand how my own experience could support others.”

Her progression was not unusual. The organisation’s ELE-Ments programme combines paid work experience with accredited training and guarantees interviews for those who complete it, with a target for at least 60% to move into permanent roles.

The structure reflects a broader tension. Many organisations recognise the value of lived experience but rely on informal or unpaid involvement. Without training, pay and progression, that involvement can remain symbolic.

A policy can address this by turning principle into commitment: paying people for their time, integrating them into teams and creating routes into secure work, rather than treating peer roles as an endpoint.

For Amaya, that meant moving from Peer Worker to Support Worker, and eventually into management.

On the other side of the call

Before her first client conversation, Amaya worried about whether she would say the right thing. Once it began, she recognised something else: she understood how it felt to be on the other end.

“I know this is really difficult,” she would tell clients. “I’ve been in your position.”

The point was not that her experience matched theirs exactly. Instead, it changed the relationship.

“They know that we understand,” she says. “When someone is speaking to a professional who really understands where they have come from, the relationship becomes much easier.”

That understanding shapes how support is delivered. The Virtual Support Hub begins with the client’s priorities, rather than a prescribed set of actions.

The results are both practical and less easily measured. During her time in frontline support, Amaya helped clients secure an estimated £30,000 to £40,000 in financial gains. But she also saw a shift in how people engaged.

“By around week three, they start using the advice,” she says. “By the final session, they’re thinking about other areas of their life.”

One client contacted social housing after learning that support might be available, something they had not previously considered possible.

These changes are not only about empathy. They reflect decisions about pace, language and control, all areas where lived experience can influence how a service operates.

From experience to influence

Amaya now leads the Virtual Support Hub, managing seven staff. It is her first management role and the longest she has remained with one employer. After several damaging workplaces, the contrast is clear.

“This organisation really nurtures people,” she says. “No matter what stage I was in, your voice was always heard and followed up by action.”

Her experience shapes how she manages her team as well as how she supports clients. It informs decisions about communication, expectations and what people may be carrying when they arrive.

Amaya knows that many people referred to the Virtual Support Hub have already tried to find help elsewhere.

“It is really upsetting to hear that when people are in their time of need, the services that are there to assist and support them have not always done so,” she says.

Her team is trying to offer a different experience. Staff research the support available, but clients decide where the conversation begins.

“The client tells us what their priorities are. We ask, ‘What would you like to focus on at this moment?’ Then we follow their lead. In other services, people can feel dictated to, but what my team loves doing is empowering clients rather than simply doing things on their behalf.”

Client feedback suggests that distinction is felt. One person described the team as offering advice without making them “feel like a nuisance at all”.

Clean Slate’s policy extends that principle beyond individual roles. It includes plans for an Advisory Panel of current and former Peer Workers to inform service development and governance, and an ambition for people with lived experience to be represented at senior leadership level by 2030.

For other organisations, the question is not whether lived experience has value, but how far that value is allowed to travel. Is it used to illustrate reports, or to shape decisions? Are people paid and supported, or asked to contribute informally? Is there a route into leadership, or a ceiling at the frontline?

Policies matter because they answer those questions in advance.

Completing the circle

Amaya’s story traces a full cycle: receiving support, rebuilding stability, entering paid work and influencing how that support is delivered to others.

It also shows where that cycle can break down. Without time, training and pay, lived experience can be reduced to testimony. Without influence, it can sit alongside services rather than shaping them.

When those elements are in place, the effect is cumulative. Experience gained through hardship becomes part of the service itself, not as a story told after the fact, but as knowledge used in real time.

For Clean Slate, the anniversary was not only about marking two decades of work. It was also about showing how that approach has evolved.

Amaya’s role is one example of what that can look like: a former client now responsible for how others experience the same service.

“They know that we understand,” she says.

It is a simple statement, but it points to a larger shift: from services designed for people to services shaped with and by them.