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You do not need a college degree, political connections, or years of advocacy experience to make a difference. If you've experienced homelessness, housing insecurity, poverty, foster care, addiction, incarceration, or another systemic challenge, your lived experience is valuable. In fact, many organizations are actively working to include people with lived experience because they understand that better policies begin with listening to the people most affected. For too long, d

For a long time, I believed that because I had experienced homelessness, addiction, poverty, and countless barriers, my voice didn't belong in the rooms where decisions were being made. I assumed policy was something created by lawyers, politicians, researchers, and people with degrees hanging on their walls. I thought I had nothing to contribute. I couldn't have been more wrong. What I've learned over the past few years is that there are organizations across the country act

Yesterday I attended a webinar featuring Regina Cannon, and one quote has stayed with me ever since: "Equity is best defined as just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential." That definition challenged me to think differently about policy. Too often we think of policy as a document too complicated to understand, written in government buildings by people we'll never meet. In reality, policy touches every part of o