You can’t truly understand something until it happens to you.
Meet Charlie
Meet Charlie
You can’t truly understand something until it happens to you.
Working with us
Our objective is to employ or provide participation including volunteering for individuals who have experienced social exclusion
Our staff make The Maslow Foundation what it is. Everyone’s contribution is valued and acknowledged as we adopt a true, community strengths based approach creating joy, hope and meaning for ourselves and others.
We recognise that your lived experience provides wisdom to share with others. You can empower through building relationships. You can challenge stereotypes and stigma and create new ways of delivering services.
Some of our roles are unique in that they are only open to those who have expertise through lived experience.
- High Intensity Users of Services
- Gypsy & Traveller Communities
- Experience as a Veteran
- Struggles with Education and Employment
- Poverty
- Young People and Young Adults
- Gender
- Mental Health
- Disability
- Neuro-diversity
- Addiction
- Criminal Justice System
- A family member or friend
- Digital Exclusion
- ‘Feeling other’
Our roles include opportunities for participation:
- Accessing leisure, sport, creativity and environmental activities
- Accessing education
- Accessing technology
Our roles include opportunities to volunteer:
- Human Library to tell your story to others and enable organisations to be able to consider your narrative to support their own service development including technology
- Peer roles supporting our coaches to work alongside others, using mutual sharing and commonality of experience to create hope, joy and meaning
- Loneliness Advocates, Self Esteem Champions and Support providing a listening ear to others
- Neighbourhood Participants mapping your community assets so we understand your community resources
Our roles include opportunities to be employed through the government permitted earning schemes, employed roles and apprenticeships.
- Peer Coaches building trusted relationships, underpinned by mutuality and reciprocity to move towards user led goals
- Peer Navigators uses their knowledge from their own lived experiences of challenges, accessing support and navigating a range of services, to promote access to wider community resources promoting self-advocacy
- Action Researchers will collate feedback from our services and that of others to create a qualitative evidence base to underpin our services and ensure that this represents the diversity of our community
- Reverse Mentors will work with leaders and professionals to ensure that we understand the perspective of others to inform our decision making
- Professional Consultancy ensuring your wisdom is able to support the co-design of services, including Digital Technology, from pilots, to commissioning and as part of governance and investigation analysis and within the regulatory organisations who inspect.
Our roles include our leadership teams:
- All roles will be accessible to those with lived experience
- Board Trustees
We believe that co-production achieves Joy, Hope and Meaning in our lives.
The attitude, qualities, authenticity and skills you bring to your role in the Foundation builds on our positive culture. We embed psychological safety with a trauma informed environment offering support, development and job satisfaction.
Working with us makes the Maslow difference.
Our Lived Experience Network
The Maslow Foundation is dedicated to nurturing a wise and flourishing workforce which embody our core values of hope, joy and meaning. The elevation of those with lived experience of systemic disadvantage is central to this vision.
Lived experience employees are embedded at all levels of our charity from board level through to our permitted earnings employees.
Recent decades have seen increasing numbers of workers reporting to feel overwhelmed, apathetic, and anxious. This phenomenon is particularly acute amongst those who face systematic barriers to inclusion.
The Maslow Foundation is working to address the workforce crisis through our lived experience network and alumni. Our aim is to create a catalytic community of thriving individuals able to share knowledge, wisdom, and resources for the empowerment of those with lived experience.

We are creating a human library for those with lived experience to share their insight and knowledge, we see this evolving into a valuable resource for learning and research. As a part of our bespoke research offering, we are training lived experience evaluators and researchers to aid effective service delivery.
An inclusive workforce which centers those with lived experience of systematic disadvantage is core to our social value statement and governance framework.
How we help
How we Work

LIVED EXPERIENCE
Lived Experience Mentors are our secret. We are inspired in all aspects of our work by those who have lived experience of disadvantage.

CO-CREATING
Our projects are co-created with other charities, the public sector and the communities we serve.
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REGISTERED CHARITY NUMBER: 1197354