For the past twenty years, I’ve been knee-deep in the space of helping people navigating the trappings of poverty find their way back to work.

That’s people whose lived experience includes steep barriers to employment – housing insecurity, justice system involvement, or just being a young person who has hit a rough go. People like Raahsaan, a teddy-bear of a man I’m proud to call my friend.

I met Raahsaan almost twenty years ago to the day. He was a few months on the other side of incarceration and was (and remains) the gentlest person I’ve ever met. As we got to know each other over time, I realized the root of his lived experience: his mom died of cervical cancer when he was just 13 years old. In an instant, he became man of the household and felt the immediate need to support his sister and three little brothers.

But in his neighborhood, there wasn’t a clear path to making money to put food on the table. There were more liquor stores than grocery stores, more pay day loan providers than banks. The one thing that showed promise – and frankly, community – were the young men hanging out in the streets.

Raahsaan lost his way for a bit in that life, and on the other side of incarceration, found his way to Cara, an employment social enterprise, to get back to work.

After working with Cara for over a decade, he got scooped up by another enterprise, became the first in his family to get a bachelor’s degree, and now serves as a site manager for a program helping young men leave life on the streets. Raahsaan uses his own lived experience of survival, tenacity, awareness, drive, and leadership, to show them it’s possible to find another way.

Raahsaan’s story is exceptional, but it is not rare.

The reality is we have an entire talent pool in this country on which we are missing out – a pool who remind us every day that talent is not measured solely by words on a resume, but by the string of experiences that make people creative, resilient, and whole.

Lived experience is not just what you’ve done or what’s been done to you. It’s sometimes how you become who you gloriously, positively, affirmatively are.

Lived experience might more aptly be called lived expertise.

As we reflect on 2024 and prepare for a new year ahead, we at REDF are engaging with this idea of lived expertise. What doors open for us when we change our lens?

As you consider the value of lived expertise, I’d ask for you to do three things:

1. Get curious: Google your workplace’s most entry-level job descriptions, and find out what requirements are in place that might be boxing people out unfairly. What can you do to push for more equitable hiring?
2. Get proximate: Get to know the people in your community working to overcome employment barriers. To get started, check out the incredible enterprises that we invest in across the U.S.
3. Get intentional:  Your purchases matter. Where you can, buy from organizations and companies that value lived expertise. A great place to start: Our social enterprise gift guide, which is available all year round!

If we can recognize the lived expertise of others, we can interrupt the generational transfer of poverty and replace it with the generational transfer of joy. I know this to be true when I see pics of Raahsaan and his three grandkids – 13, 9, and two months old. They know him only as the funny, wise, silly papa bear. And for them, that is his lived expertise.

And their future of what’s not just possible – but probable – is forever changed as a result.

—Maria Kim, REDF President & CEO