2025 Policy Recommendation
- Enact a formal guidance/protocol for naming membership when creating new legislatively mandated bodies. This protocol should become a required part of standard operating procedure for the legislature. A membership template must include individuals with relevant lived experience, based on a given bill’s impacted communities. Renewed Policy Recommendation (2022, 2024)
- Require the coordinating entity to receive training on how best to incorporate the knowledge of family and community members with lived experience into the legislatively mandated bodies’ processes and deliverables. This includes how to ready the table for their success and ensure the inclusion of their voices. Once recruited to serve, family representatives should be provided an orientation and targeted supports to reduce barriers to full participation.
What It Means
Vermont does not have a formal process or consistent protocol for engaging the expertise of those with lived experience in the policymaking process. When legislatively mandated bodies such as study committees, task forces, and/or councils are formed, they may or may not go through a process of identifying necessary representation. The result is that those with lived experience are often minimally represented or not represented at all. Even when they are represented, the structure and process of the bodies are not adapted to allow the expertise of those who are directly impacted to be fully included and incorporated in findings and recommendations.
Why It Matters
Effective public policy solutions must be informed by the knowledge and experience of those most directly impacted and grounded in local and regional context. Considering the barriers that representatives with lived experience may face—both logistical (transportation, child care, time off work, language barriers, etc.) as well as psychological (meeting format and/or pace, acronym and jargon use, unfamiliar setting, unknown fellow representatives, etc.)—and supporting or alleviating these barriers are critical to ensuring all of a body’s membership is empowered to fully participate.
Connects to VECAP Goal 2:
Families and communities play a leading role in children’s well-being.
Spotlight on Equity
Historically, systemic barriers to the inclusion of a broad range of voices have resulted in inequitable systems that impact historically marginalized communities disproportionately. Addressing long-term systemic inequities requires challenging previously held assumptions of “expert knowledge” to include lived experience.
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