Valuing Lived Experience in Research: A Q&A with Sally from Inspire Women

What is Inspire Women and how did it start?

Yes, so I’m the Founder of Inspire Women. The organisation started at a time in my life when I was very lost, and society wasn’t providing the kind of support I needed as a woman who was really struggling with her mental health. I was searching for something, and over time I realised that there were lots of other women who were searching for something too.

I’d worked in the third sector for a long time and have a background in coaching and community development. I decided I wanted to use my experience to help other women who were struggling with their mental health, so I developed a programme called Finding Me. At the end of this programme, the women who participated asked me – what do we do now? And to cut a long story short, we ended up setting up a women’s centre in Oldham. All of the women that came had experienced inequality in some way, whether it was gender inequality or poverty or mental illness. We’d all been impacted by the failures of the system.

Women Inspire is a very non-hierarchical space – it’s about women helping other women and using our own lived experience to make change. It’s evolved into a movement of likeminded women who come together, build community and celebrate one another. Our women have gone on to create their own women’s groups and start different projects in other settings. That’s one of the greatest things. Because when you struggle with your mental health, you can withdraw from life and lose your purpose. And when we lose our purpose, we lose everything. I’m speaking from my own experience when I say that leaves you in a very dark place.

Sadly during COVID-19 we lost our centre. When you lose something, you can disappear or you can reinvent yourself. So we reinvented ourselves. We started reimagining our work and delivering a lot of what we did together online. We learnt a lot during this time about how to build community virtually.

How did you find collaborating with researchers as part of The Ideas Fund?

We worked alongside some really great academics as part of The Ideas Fund. I think one of the things we’re most proud of is that we’ve been able to do research in a different way, and the women in our community have really been given the opportunity to shine. We used traditional research techniques, like questionnaires, but we also used more creative approaches, and that’s the thing that really excites us.

Prior to The Ideas Fund we’d had years of extractive relationships with universities and research organisations. It can be hard sharing personal stories. It takes a lot of emotional energy and trust to talk about difficult experiences. And you do it because you believe in being part of creating change. But we’ve definitely had experiences of being treated poorly in the past. We’ve shared our stories with researchers and haven’t got anything back. We haven’t even seen the final report and that just makes you feel like they are paying lip service to lived experience, and it’s a tick box exercise.

But through The Ideas Fund we worked with Sarah, a Professor at the University of Manchester, and Rosa, our researcher from Huddersfield and these relationships were so valuable. Rosa had a background in women’s research, particularly working alongside women in what were classed as deprived communities, so it was really special to be able to work with her. In our evaluation she reflected about our relationship and how much she’s learnt from our women and that’s definitely mutual.

A group of our women have gone on to create sessions and deliver them at universities about how to do research with communities, and learn from women with lived experience in a way that isn’t tokenistic. They’ve had incredible feedback so far. I think working with academics has given us that little bit of confidence. So many of the women would never have seen themselves going into a university before, let alone teach others about what they’re doing.

How have you found working with The Ideas Fund?

We see The Ideas Fund as an investor, rather than a funder. There’s a sense that we’re in this together. They are investing in our women. And we’re delighted to have received continuation funding, because long term investment is so essential. I’ve been in this sector for over 30 years and I think it’s fair to say it’s been a hand to mouth existence the whole time. I hope that investors like The Ideas Fund can play a role in helping organisations like us longer term and really change the way research is done with communities.

What are your hopes and dreams for the future with Inspire Women?

We have a number of women who are now Community Researchers and we’d love to develop a Community Research Hub in Manchester. We also have a group that we’ve been developing called Friends of Inspire, who are trying to change how research is viewed.

We used to be known as Inspire Women Oldham, but since the loss of our centre we’ve realised that we can exist beyond one geographical area, so we’re looking into growing and expanding as a community.

We also desperately need to update our website! So we’ll be looking to work on that too, as well as developing some new podcasts to get the word out about our work. One of our women, Selena, has been mentored by an amazing woman from MIT Media on how to produce podcasts. So that’s an amazing skill to have in the team.

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Thank you to Sally for talking to us. If you want to find out more about Inspire Women, you can visit their website.