Get involved

You may like to get involved where you live. This is a great way to start, and to have your say about how things are run in your home.
You can attend or help to run customer meetings, give feedback, organise events or suggest, organise or lead new activities. You could even become a customer representative, speaking for your service and fellow customers to others.
Different services have different ways of getting involved, so speak to your support worker about what is on offer where you live, or suggest some ideas of your own!

Do you have personal life experiences that you feel could benefit our staff? Perhaps you’ve experienced a mental health crisis, faced the challenges of addiction, or survived domestic abuse?

Our Experts by Experience (EBE) training programme offers you the opportunity to share your personal experiences with our staff teams. We’ll support you to use your insight to help train our staff on the challenges many of our customers face.

The training has covered a wide range of topics including mental health, substance misuse, LGBT+, domestic abuse, Autism, mental health and personality disorders. We are always looking to expand the areas the training covers.

The training has many benefits –  staff learn directly from Experts by Experience which means they can deliver better support.

Our trainers gain skills, confidence, great work experience and for many, most importantly, the knowledge that their experiences are benefitting others.

Click here to read Phillip’s story to find out more about what he does as an Expert by Experience trainer. 

You can also use your life experiences to offer support to other customers who may be in need.

Through our Peer Support Programme, we train current and former customers to support others who may be struggling with similar issues. For example, mental health, healthy living or maintaining their accommodation.

It benefits both the person being supported and the peer volunteer.

The customers get extra support (on top of that from our staff team) from someone who has a real understanding of what they may be going through. They know that they’ve ‘been there, done that’.

For the peer volunteer, they gain skills, confidence and the knowledge that they are making a real difference.

For many, it’s a useful first step into work. Many of our peer supporters have gone onto paid work with us or other health and social care organisations. This is an established pathway for our customers to gain employment with us. It recognises the need for genuine employment opportunities, as well as the invaluable ‘lived experience’ skill set that they bring with them.

With the endorsement of their placement’s service manager and after gaining all the skills and experience they need, volunteers are now able to progress into agency support work with us, the Bank Support Worker (BSW) role.

Click here to read Ash’s story to find out more about his work as a peer support volunteer, and bank support worker.

If you have received care and support before, you know better than anyone what a good service looks like. That’s why we’ve created a team of customer quality checkers.

Quality checkers visit our services alongside managers to check the standard and quality of our services. They bring their experiences of using services to give feedback and suggest areas where improvements can be made.

They are an important part of our quality management system.

Quality checkers are trained, get to meet customers and staff from across our services and play an important part in helping to make sure we deliver great services.

Heads-up is our newsletter created by and for our customers. It is released every three months and is sent to all Look Ahead customers.

The newsletter includes interviews, creative writing and updates about opportunities and activities with Look Ahead.

You can get involved in different ways. You can work with us to make the newsletter, send us something to include or simply just enjoy reading it!

Click here to read the latest issues of Heads Up.

Joining a customer voice panel is a great way to get your voice heard and be a representative for other customers.

Our Tenant and Landlord Panel meets four times a year to challenge us on our performance as a landlord. We want to know what it is really like to live in one of our properties, and how we can make it better.

Our tenant representatives lead these meetings, and tell us what they want to talk about. For example, previous meetings have focused on repairs and maintenance, the complaints process, customer Wi-Fi, cleaning and other issues.

Our Customer Incidents Panel is co-chaired by a former customer, and meet regularly to make sure that customers are at the heart of our safeguarding response. They review anonymised incident reports, and share their reflections on what we can learn to prevent and better support customers through similar incidents in the future.

These meetings have many benefits. It is a great chance to gain confidence, and communication skills. You can also be sure that you are helping us improve our services. That is because you are helping us to gain insights into the true experiences of the people we support, and how we can improve these.

We aim to have customers involved in at least 80% of all recruitment across Look Ahead, all the way from a new support worker in your service up to a new member of our board!

You can bring a unique and valuable perspective to recruitment, and we want you to get involved. This could look like touring prospective members of staff around the service, customer activities, sitting on an interview panel – and much more.

We will provide you with all of the training you need. You get the opportunity to help choose the staff that work to support you, as well as new skills that you can use in your own job interviews. Look Ahead are able to employ better staff based on the skills and traits that our customers value most.

Sometimes there are opportunities for people we support to speak about their experiences at events and even to the media.

So far, we have supported people to speak at an event with the National Housing Federation and Royal College of Psychiatrists, fundraiser events with our partners at LandAid and to speak to The Guardian newspaper and BBC Radio 5.