Lived Expertise Leadership & Power Building: Connecting leaders with lived expertise to foster belonging, hope, and collective power, transforming individual expertise into shared influence, expanded networks, and systems-level impact.
Public Education & Narrative Change: Shifting how families, communities, and systems are understood to promote more equitable and strengths-based approaches.
Systems Learning & Innovation: Generating community-informed solutions that leverage lived experience expertise to improve systems and outcomes.
Workforce Development: Strengthening prevention-centered, healing-informed, and equity-driven practice across systems and sectors.
Community Collaboration & Systems Alignment: Aligning organizations, systems, and community partners around shared goals for child and family well-being.
Policy & Systems Reform: Advancing policy and systems reforms that strengthen families, reduce unnecessary system involvement, address inequities, and embed lived experience expertise in decision-making.
Our Work in Action
Shaping the Future of Child and Family Well-Being
LENS is helping shape the future of child and family well-being through leadership in the Massachusetts Initiative to Reduce Child Neglect, a statewide effort to reimagine how public systems strengthen families and promote well-being. The initiative challenges long-standing assumptions that conflate neglect with poverty and reframes neglect as a systems issue shaped by broader structural conditions rather than placing responsibility solely on individual families.
Charles Lerner, Executive Director of LENS, was selected to serve on the initiative’s Steering Committee and to chair its Lived Expertise (LEx) Workgroup. In these roles, he is helping ensure that people with lived expertise are meaningfully positioned to shape decisions, inform solutions, and influence the future of child and family well-being. His appointment reflects LENS’s commitment to advancing systems transformation by positioning lived expertise as essential knowledge, wisdom, and leadership.
Building Community and Collective Power Through Lived Expertise
LENS is partnering with the Network of Intersectional Professionals (NIP), a values-based community of dual experts who bring both lived expertise and professional experience to the systems they work within. NIP members bring diverse perspectives from across sectors, combining firsthand knowledge of navigating systems with the professional insight and experience needed to help shape meaningful change.
Through this partnership, LENS is supporting NIP in strengthening connection, belonging, and collective identity while helping shape a vision for future programming. Together, we are creating opportunities for mentorship, collaboration, and shared learning that recognize the power of lived expertise and build collective influence for systems change.
Raising the Alarm on Missing Children
In a 2025 Boston Globe article, we challenged the narrative surrounding young people who “run” from foster care, emphasizing that too often people judge young people rather than the systems that drive them to flee. For more than a decade, we have been raising the alarm about the frequency with which youth in foster care “run,” calling for a shift from complacency to urgency. There are countless reasons why young people run, but if we assume responsibility for their safety and well-being, we must do better. Too often, young people are not running toward something; they are fleeing unbearable, and sometimes inhumane, conditions that we have created. Their stories remind us that meaningful systems change begins by listening to those with lived expertise.
https://apps.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/metro/investigations/missing-kids/ – *If you can’t access the full article- some readers are only seeing the Q&A portion- please email us at [email protected]
Breaking Silos, Advancing Collective Action
Advocates Unite! was an inaugural convening that reimagined how people come together to advance systems change. Bringing together people with lived expertise, child and family advocates, system partners, and community leaders, the summit created space to break down silos, challenge assumptions, and engage in courageous conversations about the changes needed to better support children, youth, families, and communities.
Guided by the theme, “The time is always right to do what’s right,” the convening centered truth-telling, connection, and collective action. It reflected LENS’s belief that meaningful systems change begins when people with lived expertise, professional knowledge, and community wisdom come together as equal partners to shape solutions and influence the future.
Participant reflections underscored the power of creating spaces where new possibilities can emerge:
“It moved me to tears. It’s hard to come up with the right words—so: WOW. Transformative change is afoot.” — Participant reflection following Advocates Unite!
Standing Up For Children’s Rights
Every day, children in foster care experience violations of their rights without notice or meaningful recourse. The Foster Child Bill of Rights would change that by codifying those rights and creating greater transparency and accountability for the systems entrusted with their care. Watch Charles Lerner’s testimony in support of the Foster Child Bill of Rights. Drawing on his lived expertise as a former foster youth, he called on Massachusetts child welfare leaders to act with urgency: “We must have transparency, because silence and inaction cause harm, and in some cases, cost lives.”