Kate Chivers, Birth Companions’ Director of Engagement reflects on our trauma-informed engagement model, and invites registrations for our new training course.
“It gives you a sense of purpose. When the meetings are powerful and productive, it makes you feel like your voice matters.”
Birth Companions lived experience team member talking about the impact of positive engagement work
Birth Companions’ well-developed and highly respected model of lived experience engagement is embedded across our Lived Experience Programme.
It is at the very heart of everything we do, shaped by our commitment to working in a trauma-informed, non-judgemental, and woman-centred way, from the delivery of our frontline services to our work to drive real, tangible change in the systems, policies and practices that shape the lives of the women we work with.
This model has been shaped by many factors, frameworks, and theories. Over our 30-year history, we have become specialists in supporting women to make their voices heard and influence real change, and in ensuring that they feel safe, supported, valued, and respected while doing this often-challenging work.
That’s why we’ve now developed a new training offer; to help others learn from, and apply, our model in their own areas of work.
As lived experience engagement work becomes increasingly widespread across the voluntary, public, and academic sectors, we want to support women in raising their voices for positive change, but we also want to raise expectations around how this work can be done safely and effectively.
Our new online trauma-informed engagement training has been co-designed with fifteen members of the Birth Companions Lived Experience Team.
Across two hours, two members of the team and I help participants explore the core values of a trauma-informed approach and how this is practically applied to engagement work, before having an open workshop-style discussion to help them consider applying the approach in their own projects.
When asked what they found most useful about the course, recent attendees said:
"Seeing the way that Birth Companions have worked with the trauma-informed principles and made that into an operational way of doing lived experience engagement."
"…the thorough overview of the content, peppered with real-world examples and lived experience perspectives."
"Concepts linked to specific examples from the team's experience, and particularly hearing from people with lived experience themselves about what works (and doesn't) and why it matters."
Developing and delivering this training was a genuinely collaborative effort. I’m excited by the prospect of sharing our approach with others working across academia, policy, service provision and more, helping to foster bold conversations with care and compassion.
While this training has a focus on working with women who face severe disadvantage and inequity during pregnancy and early motherhood, it can be applied more widely to support the development of engagement work in other groups and communities. If you think it might benefit you and your work, please do get in touch.
To book a place on a Birth Companions’ trauma informed engagement training session, or to find out more about commissioning bespoke training, contact Kate Chivers, Director of Engagement at kate@birthcompanions.org.uk.