Shelter Scotland’s Aoife Deery asks how can we learn from the experiences of those we help to improve our services?

Many charities in Scotland will be aware of the value and importance of service user involvement in their work, and we at Shelter Scotland are no different. In recent months, the Communications and Policy department has been reflecting and experimenting on how we can best involve service users in our work and planning.

As an organisation, Shelter Scotland does a significant amount of service user involvement and we are always looking for new ways to involve people with lived experience of homelessness or bad housing in helping to shape and inform our work. Some examples of how we currently involve service users are:

However, it can be extremely difficult to involve service users in a non-tokenistic and genuinely valuable way which meets the needs, abilities and expectations of both the organisation and the people we have worked with. It can also be particularly challenging to interest people in the often opaque and time consuming world of policy and research.

A useful way to measure the value of our efforts is to refer back to Arnstein (1969)’s Ladder of Citizen Participation. Our ambition in the Communications and Policy department is to find opportunities to move up the ladder and involve the people who use our services in ways that help to direct our policy priorities and shape our campaigns for real change.

In March, we held our biggest policy event which was our annual Homelessness Conference and this represented a turning point in how I personally view service user involvement in policy work and the incredible impact it can have.