Lived Experience at the Heart of Change
At Women’s Inclusive Team (WIT), we do more than deliver services. We work alongside women, children, families and communities to understand the barriers they experience and bring those experiences into conversations about how services are designed and delivered.
Our approach is community-rooted and informed by lived experience. Through our frontline work, outreach and partnerships, we create opportunities for people to share what is and is not working and contribute their perspectives to the services and systems that affect their lives.
Our role is often to act as a trusted bridge between communities and services, helping people be heard while supporting organisations to better understand the needs and experiences of the communities they serve.
How We Create Change
Our systems-change work includes:
• Creating safe and culturally responsive spaces for people to share their experiences.
• Bringing lived experience and community insight into service design and decision-making.
• Identifying recurring barriers through our frontline work and community engagement.
• Supporting co-production between communities and statutory, voluntary and community organisations.
• Sharing community learning with professionals, commissioners and partners.
• Delivering training and engagement to strengthen understanding of the communities we serve.
• Contributing community insight to consultations, strategy and commissioning discussions.
Our aim is to move beyond simply identifying inequalities and ensure communities are part of shaping the solutions.
What This Looks Like in Practice
WIT piloted Flourishing Communities with Somali women in 2022 before securing three-year funding from The National Lottery Community Fund. Working with Tower Hamlets CVS (THCVS), Limehouse Project and Praxis, the programme expanded to engage Somali and Bangladeshi women and women who had recently migrated to the UK.
The programme created culturally responsive spaces for women to raise health inequalities and barriers to accessing services. WIT brought this insight to professionals and delivered cultural-awareness training to help services better understand and respond to the communities they serve.
Through this work, concerns raised by Somali women about communication at a local GP practice contributed to the recruitment of Somali-speaking reception staff—demonstrating how community insight can lead to practical improvements.
The learning and relationships developed through Flourishing Communities continue to inform WIT’s community-engagement and systems-change work.
Community Voice at Board Level
In May 2026, WIT established a Community Voice Subcommittee, a Trustee-led group created to strengthen the connection between community experience and WIT’s governance, strategy and decision-making.
The subcommittee provides a formal route for emerging issues from WIT’s frontline work and the communities we serve to be considered at Board level.
It helps WIT identify recurring barriers and inequalities, strengthen the evidence behind those concerns and consider where the organisation can use its relationships and influence to raise issues with commissioners, statutory services and other decision-makers.
By embedding community voice within our governance structure, we are working to ensure lived experience informs not only individual projects, but also WIT’s wider priorities, partnerships and influencing work.
Working in Partnership
Systems change cannot happen through one organisation alone.
WIT works alongside health services, local government, housing, education, voluntary and community organisations and other partners across Tower Hamlets and beyond.
Our role is often to act as a trusted bridge between communities and services — bringing together lived experience, frontline learning and professional expertise to better understand barriers and explore practical ways of improving access, engagement and practice.
Working alongside partners across our local system
Some of the organisations WIT works alongside to connect community insight, lived experience and service improvement.