Lived experience, intersectionality and empathy: reflections from Share the Dignity workshop

Each year ACIL Allen offices from across the country come together for 2 days to connect, reflect and look ahead. With around 60 of us across the country, we all know each other and delivering projects collaboratively across offices has been commonplace for many years. However, despite being a relatively small firm, there is great diversity across the fields we work, which means many of us don’t work directly together.

Earlier this year, we gathered on Turrbal and Yuggera lands in the heart of Brisbane, where we engaged Team Building With Purpose to host a session with Share the Dignity, a local women’s charity working to end period poverty. There has been plenty written about the importance of purposeful work, and how, particularly for younger generations, purposeful work and organisations that give active attention to social responsibility are key to staff engagement and motivation¹. This isn’t something that can just be ticked off with a single activity, so while this was an important consideration in building this event for our staff, it wasn’t the main driver. It’s also safe to say that afterwards, many of us had learned things we didn’t even know we needed to. 

Those of us coordinating this part of the agenda deliberately selected the Share the Dignity charity as an intersection of several areas we have worked on over the years through evaluation, planning and strategy development across projects spanning homelessness, domestic violence, education, and the free provision of sanitary products to young people. 

Our work in these and other fields continues to recognise lived and living experience as a form of expertise that improves how we understand the impact of programs and policies on those they are designed for, and how we develop recommendations that are practical, respectful and more likely to be effective in real-world settings. Hearing the real-life stories of women, girls and people who menstruate and, on top of experiencing extreme adversity and trauma, have the additional stress of menstruating without access to essential sanitary products, was incredibly powerful.

We have led extensive work across social policy where we often engage firsthand with service users and those who have experienced trauma and homelessness. Some of our staff bring their own lived experiences of family violence and poverty. Over 40% of our firm have direct experience of menstruation with the remainder bringing indirect experiences of periods through their families, friends and those they care for. Yet we still had blind spots in the context of period poverty. Many had never considered the lived reality of what life is like for those menstruating while experiencing homelessness, having to make difficult choices about feeding themselves and sometimes their families over being able to pay for sanitary products.

This was a powerful reminder of the importance of intersectionality, where groups of people experience trauma and challenges differently because our lives are shaped by intersecting forms of privilege dependingon context and existing power structures². While we may have direct, indirect, or learned experience, it is never likely to be the full picture. This is why we continue to lead with lived and living experience engagements across our projects that are more than tokenistic and recognise the compounding impacts of marginalisation that people experience. Where it may not be possible to undertake more fulsome engagements to explore this, it is important to be upfront about such limitations and missing perspectives.

The concept of intersectionality has been around for almost 4 decades, but more recently across engagements spanning family violence, education, housing, aged care, and disability we have been revisiting the need to ‘mainstream intersectionality’ to improve how organisations work and deliver better policies and services that meet the needs of all. Broadly, this framing moves beyond reducing people and their experience into one category at a time but rather “treats social positions as relational and makes visible the multiple positioning that constitutes everyday life and the power relations that are central to it."³

It’s also ok to ask those who know more within the fields in which we work what blind spots we might have. As consultants it is not our role to know everything, but to harness existing knowledge across diverse sources and experiences, understand what we don’t know and identify what gaps might need to be addressed so we can provide realistic and purposeful advice to our clients that genuinely considers intersectionality. But we can’t do this without empathy.

Empathy is of paramount importance in consulting. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand the perspectives of others⁴ and underpins our capacity to provide deeply tailored advice to our clients while also providing the tools to navigate conflicting views and lead constructive discussions⁵. Empathy is also essential in fostering a healthy workplace⁶ and creating and maintaining an environment where people want to stay and feel safe and valued for their contributions.

Sessions like the one we held earlier this year with Share the Dignity are designed to contribute to a shared sense of empathy across teams. We sat in groups that don’t always work closely together and opened up new levels of connection as moments of self and group reflection were safely shared among colleagues. As we discussed how this was relevant to our day to day work, it was also a powerful reminder, that, despite working across such diverse fields and client groups, poverty and social challenges are common across every area in which we work. Our often divergent fields in ACIL Allen converged on a recent project modelling increasing energy costs, where we heard powerful firsthand stories on the extremes to which some people need to go to reduce their energy bills. This further emphasised the importance of diverse and lived experience perspectives across all fields, not just within those more traditionally labelled as social policy or for our government or not-for-profit clients.

Where to from here?

So how do we make sure we continue to build on the benefits of these kinds of exercises across our firm when we return to the busyness of consulting across diverse fields, industries and client groups?

Firstly, we make time for active reflection. Across our offices we have continued to discuss this session and what we learned from it both personally and professionally. Many of us now contribute to the Share the Dignity bins in supermarkets when previously we may not have appreciated the importance of these collections.

Secondly, the session is nested within a broader approach to purposeful work and improving the contributions we make to real world issues. For example,

• In 2025 we implemented a new approach to our previously staff allocated pro-bono days, that now pools these together collectively for staff who chose to do so. This allows for us to undertake larger and more impactful projects for not for profit organisations who may not otherwise be able to fund traditional consultancy services.
• Our staff have choice and agency on projects they may seek to be involved in. As a small to medium sized enterprise there is both need and opportunity for our staff to work across diverse fields. This approach aligns knowledge and experience with issues that our people want to work on but also considers where people’s past experiences may make that difficult for them. Drawing on lived experience in an advisory or professional role is a significant endeavour and people need both agency and support to bring this contribution on their terms.
• We take the time in the development of proposals and throughout our projects to brainstorm across diverse teams what blind spots we may have, the impact this has and will continue to deliver better outcomes for our clients and the people who will be impacted directly by the advice we provide.
• We continue to explore innovative approaches to embedding lived and living experience within our projects as there are many ways to do this effectively, including embedding within teams from our own staff and working in collaboration with community and representative organisations

Lastly, we don’t pretend to have it all neatly sewn up. Working with empathy on purposeful issues is an ongoing journey of learning and reflection that will continue to strengthen the advice we provide to our clients, as well as how we work together across diverse teams on diverse issues.

¹ For example, https://teambuildingwithpurpose.com.au/how-social-impact-initiatives-enhance-employee-engagement/

² UN Women’s Intersectionality Resource Guide and Toolkit, accessed from https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/Intersectionality-resource-guide-and-toolkit-en.pdf

³ Dhamoon, R. K. (2011). Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality. Political Research Quarterly, 64(1), 230–243. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41058336

⁴ Reniers RLEP, Abu-Akel A, Seara-Cardoso A. Editorial: Cognitive Empathy and Perspective Taking: Understanding the Mechanisms of Normal and Abnormal Experiences and Abilities. Front Psychiatry. 2022 Jun 2;13:945258. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.945258. PMID: 35722573; PMCID: PMC9201905.

⁵ Vaassen, C. E., van den Broek, T. A., Aaldering, H., & Beersma, B. (2026). Increasing empathy and perspective-taking in controversial discussions: A systematic review and future research directions. In Computers in Human Behavior Reports (Vol. 22). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2026.101062

⁶ https://www.ruok.org.au/fostering-empathy-in-the-workplace