About

Community Insight is the social enterprise of Lift, a charity established in 2001 that works with homeless and vulnerable people. Community Insight was set up to provide research and training services that involve vulnerable people who have been trained as community researchers and training facilitators. These volunteer peer consultants contribute to the design, delivery and evaluation of Community Insight’s projects.

We’ve started this blog because involving and empowering vulnerable people is at the heart of what Community Insight does and we wanted to share our experience (our ideas, opinions, mistakes and best practice) with others working in this area. So we hope the blog will be interesting whether you’ve already had success with involving your clients in your work or project, or if you’ve just started to think about how to make involvement work.

We love debate and discussion, so please leave comments!

About the authors:

Michael Gray is the Research Manager at Community Insight and manages research and training projects for public and voluntary sector clients. These projects aim to improve services for homeless and vulnerable people and provide volunteering opportunities for Community Insight’s Peer Consultants.

Matt Tudge is Community Insight’s Involvement Manager. He works with client involvement groups from different support backgrounds and runs training courses in research and involvement skills, as well as short sessions on practical skills such as facilitation, storyboarding and promotional design. Matt also runs a campaign on returning empty properties to use and raising awareness of empty homes, all with essential help from Lift clients.