Philanthropic funders increasingly seek to understand how lived experience shapes leadership and program design, especially for work supporting people impacted by incarceration. Nonetheless, there is a lack of clear guidance on how to define, measure, and responsibly collect information about grantees’ lived experience. The overarching goal of the initiative is to provide recommendations for collecting such data.

Why This Matters

In this report, we examine how lived experience is understood, distributed, and integrated across Ascendium grantee organizations and offer practical recommendations for ethical data collection. Policymakers, philanthropic organizations, and nonprofit leaders can use our findings to improve funding practices and strengthen data collection.

What We Found

Across methods, respondents viewed lived experience as valuable yet complex, distinguishing between direct (personal involvement with incarceration or supervision) and indirect (involvement through close relationships) lived experience, both of which were seen as enhancing empathy, credibility, and priorities without replacing professional expertise.

Our findings highlight how lived experience shapes grantees’ work in multiple, interconnected ways. Grantees described how lived experience informs personal values, career paths, leadership styles, empathy for students and colleagues, and priorities around equity and access. Many reported intentionally engaging people with lived experience through hiring practices, fair‑chance employment policies, advisory boards, steering committees, and paid consultant roles. Grantees emphasized that meaningful engagement requires compensation, decision‑making power, and supportive, trauma‑informed workplace practices, rather than symbolic or tokenized inclusion.

We recommend that funders clearly define the purpose of collecting lived experience data, protect confidentiality and minimize risk, and collect data across organizational levels alongside demographic information to better understand their portfolios.

How We Did It

We used a mixed-methods approach across three phases: landscape scan, instrument development, and baseline data collection on Ascendium’s grantees. First, we conducted a literature review and landscape scan, including interviews and a focus group with 12 funders, researchers, and organizational leaders. Second, we developed a 13-item survey to measure lived experience among Ascendium grantees. Finally, we administered the survey to 209 individuals across 38 institutions, received 109 responses, and conducted quantitative and qualitative (thematic) analysis to identify patterns and insights that will inform the development of future survey instruments.