Structural Barriers to Lived Experience Engagement: Addressing Systemic Challenges: Conference

Lived experience leadership is strongly recommended as a baseline requirement by the people sincerely aligned with it as a movement across health, education, and social systems. While there are attempts to adopt this recommendation, barriers created by or embedded in many of these systems, including power imbalances, frequently undermine authentic integration of lived experience leadership, leading to tokenism and failed attempts at the intended change. This symposium brings together five studies from Australia and the Philippines that examine these common challenges across different contexts, highlighting potential solutions. The first presentation examines academic reporting of lived-experience engagement, revealing how researchers may claim participatory approaches while lacking transparency about actual practices, potentially perpetuating tokenism. The second presentation investigates how teachers with limited structural power can support children's participation rights to participation navigating through institutional constraints. The third presentation explores how trauma-informed care devolved from a lived experience-conceived social justice movement into a poorly understood yet “implemented” psy-practice. The fourth presentation examines how Filipino gay and bisexual men with HIV overcome epistemic and systematic oppression by becoming leaders in their communities yet empowering others. The fifth study addresses a "tokenism loop" in palliative care where consumer involvement faces institutional limitations. Together, these studies illustrate the ways lived experience leadership is both considered valuable and restricted. Through cross-sectoral discussion, these works explore strategies to move beyond symbolic inclusion, challenging power imbalances and advocating for practices that support genuine participation. The exchange of methodologies and insights across sectors including education, healthcare, and public literacy can initiate meaningful innovations that might otherwise remain isolated within disciplinary silos. By creating deliberate spaces to discuss power dynamics between different fields, future research, educators and policymakers can identify transferable approaches to lived experience leadership integration, ultimately strengthening implementation frameworks and fostering more user-centred and efficient service across all sectors