NSPA Lived Experience Influencers

NSPA’s Lived Experience Network is striving to ensure that suicide prevention activity across the country is underpinned by the voices of people with lived experience, and that knowledge of those with lived experience is valued, respected and seen as legitimate.
As part of this, we are working with a group of Lived Experience Influencers, who are provided with training and regular support to draw on their lived experience in influencing roles and opportunities.

On this page, you can find out what the role of an NSPA Lived Experience Influencer is, what they do and how organisations can work with our Lived Experience Influencers on suicide prevention.

Please note, we are not recruiting any new Lived Experience Influencers at the moment. If you are interested in the role in the future, then you can email livedexperience@nspa.org.uk to request to receive updates about when we are next recruiting.

NSPA Lived Experience Influencers are people who draw on their lived experience to influence and inform suicide prevention activity.
Our Lived Experience Influencers are all over 18, reside in England, and have lived experience(s) related to suicide. By ‘lived experience’, we mean personal experience of one or more of the following:

• Living with suicidal thoughts
• Experience of attempting suicide
• Being bereaved by suicide
• Supporting or caring for a loved one with experience of suicidality

We currently work with a group of over 40 Lived Experience Influencers, who have a range of lived experiences that relate to suicide, as well as other life experiences and skills that they bring into their role.

All of our Lived Experience Influencers have gone through a recruitment process, been trained, and are offered ongoing group and one-to-one support to influence and inform many different kinds of suicide prevention work.

Our Lived Experience Influencers work with a range of organisations to influence and inform suicide prevention policy, strategy, services and projects. The work that Lived Experience Influencers are involved with is varied, examples include:

• Co-producing, advising on or influencing national and/or local policy and strategy related to suicide prevention
• Working with organisations that deliver services related to suicide prevention, such as through co-production, co-development or advisory roles
• Advising on, or co-producing, research projects related to suicide prevention
• Speaking at events and conferences, both online and in person
• Co-facilitating, delivering and/ or supporting with design of workshops and/or training
• Supporting wider work of NSPA from a lived experience perspective, such as working with us on our planning, further developing our lived experience network, campaigns, events, communications, and helping us amplify and share perspectives of people with lived experience to inform policy and practice.

If you are interested in working with some of our Lived Experience Influencers to support your suicide prevention work, or would like to find out more about how we could support you to involve people with lived experience in your work, please email us at: livedexperience@nspa.org.uk.

Further reading:

If you are interested in learning more about involving people with lived experience in suicide prevention work, you may find our FAQ resource helpful.