Resilience Through Connection: Bridging Communities and Opportunities

I’m Elaine Brown, a Lived Experience Consultant here at Sedulous. Joining this new specialised team is a significant step forward in offering a clearer focus on bringing residents to opportunities that aid their life chances and acknowledge their lived experiences. I assist partner organisations in developing programmes and projects that improve understanding and successful community relationships.  

 I am continuously improving and developing my skills in encouraging conversation and engagement over a lifetime of work practices. Sedulous is determined to expand and refine involvement in structured avenues of community research planning, engagement, content delivery and follow-through. By continuing to develop new, more centred understandings of the life complexities of those living with a varied range of ailments and impediments limiting direction and/ or opportunities, we bring change.  Reducing problems fuels my creativity.     

The challenge of finding and engaging those described as ‘Hard to Reach’ feels like an irresistible mission and is definitely a passion of mine. As someone who knows about exclusion, gathering knowledge and disseminating it are powerful tools that benefit all. Not knowing, or withholding, is a denial of rights and, therefore, life-limiting; while it has always been present, I aim for reduction—information is powerful. 

Sedulous was created by a group of women with years of experience in varied aspects of community work, endeavours, and practices. It was time to co-create and help further developments beneficial to a number of areas of interest, with the aim of bringing more into personal progress and leaving fewer behind. 

Our strong desire is to work with more direct engagement with agencies that are also focused on better understanding, engagement, and progress of local communities and their roles in their own locale.

A slow burner, having the capacity to offer a warm engagement presence able to penetrate the nuances of the said and unspoken hurts and aspirations. I search for ways to develop the lived experiences of the many different types, natures and characteristics of the participants we have and will come across. It is their resilience and effortful determination to investigate routes to overcome the burdens they have carried often, for many years. 

It is the careful design of our research questions, engagement processes, ability to create a warm relationship from the outset, and the tonality of both method questions and voice, which, of course, are designed to engage and reassure our listening and capacity to ‘hold’ them on that life journey.

As we collaborate to develop a list of priorities, we can position our knowledge journey by reaching out to organisations with similar aims. This solidifies unity and growth in both directions.

If the contents here align with your hopes, aims, and ambitions, we would delight in having conversations that would help build long-lasting mutual benefits for you, your community interests, and all of us at Sedulous.