How one Third Sector Interface is making lived experience more visible and usable within strategic decision-making – and testing whether being heard differently leads to changed services and funding.
A conversation with Maureen Allan, Chief Officer of Volunteer Centre East Lothian
10 minute read
Volunteer Centre East Lothian has spent the past two and a half years working with SIGNAL Life Maps alongside the communities it serves – not as a stand-alone data exercise, but as part of a wider approach to listening, practical support, community intelligence and strategic influence. Chief Officer Maureen Allan reflects on what the work has made visible, why interpretation matters, and what it will take to ensure community evidence shapes decisions rather than simply reaches the room.
Where to start
Andy: Before we dive in, what should I be asking? What question gets at the heart of what the last couple of years has taught you?
Maureen: As a Third Sector Interface, VCEL sits between grassroots communities and strategic decision-making tables. Our role is to carry what is happening at community level into the places where decisions are made – and to bring what happens in those rooms back to communities. We have always done that through relationships, lived experience and community knowledge. That was evidence then and it is evidence now. The difficulty is that systems have not always captured, connected or given it the same weight as quantitative or administrative data.
Maureen: SIGNAL has helped us make that evidence more structured, visible and usable. It gives us a dignified, person-led way to understand what people’s lives look like in the round – not sorted into service categories or filtered through eligibility thresholds. The Life Map does not replace a person’s story; it helps us hold the story and the data together.
Maureen: It is important to be precise about where SIGNAL sits in the bigger picture. It works at the level of people and families – capturing what matters, what has changed and what remains stuck. VCEL’s wider role as a TSI is to connect those experiences with the insight held by staff, volunteers, grassroots organisations and partners, and to carry that shared intelligence into strategic conversations. SIGNAL is one evidence route within a much bigger model; it is not the whole model. The real question is not simply what SIGNAL does, but how it strengthens VCEL’s bridge role and whether that leads to better decisions.
Making it fit
Andy: You’ve written about staff confusion early on – and your own confusion too. What did that teach you about how something gets translated from a methodology into actual practice?
Maureen: Staff raised concerns almost immediately. They asked how they were meant to ask fifty-two questions while building trust; some questions felt too personal or too far removed from the conversation in front of them. My first reaction was that this might be resistance to change.
Maureen: Then I joined the first training session and realised I was confused too. That mattered. If the approach did not make sense to me, despite understanding its purpose and the policy landscape, we could not expect staff to use it confidently and naturally with people.
Maureen: So we stopped and listened. SIGNAL could not simply be rolled out as a system; it had to be translated and co-owned – made Scottish, made local and made meaningful. The methodology is strong, but it only works when it fits the relationships, language and practice of the people using it. That learning belongs to our staff as much as it does to me.
What Life Maps made visible
Andy: What are the Life Maps showing you now that existing data wasn’t capturing?
Maureen: People live horizontally; systems often operate vertically. A person’s life is not divided into service boxes – housing, health, income and transport. It is all connected. When we look only at data organised within vertical silos, we miss the whole picture and the interaction between pressures.
Maureen: When someone names transport as their priority, they are rarely naming only a bus problem. It affects whether they can reach a health appointment, remain part of community life, and feel confident and independent. We have also identified more than 100 unpaid carers – not because they suddenly appeared, but because we asked what matters and created space for people to name their caring role. They were not invisible to their families or communities; they were often invisible to systems that did not ask the right questions.
Andy: With around 400 Life Maps across young people, adults and older people, including more than 20% follow-ups, what patterns keep appearing?
Maureen: Each cohort tells a different story, and the age spread is important: the average age is 15 for young people, 35 for adults and 82 for older people. Young people are naming emotional regulation, self-esteem, anxiety and confidence – the internal experience, not simply a service category. Adults appear to be under the greatest combined pressure: transport, housing, work that fits around caring, financial pressure and isolation. Their maps show the least positive picture of the three cohorts. Many are coping, but they are worn down.
Maureen: Older people are often naming social isolation and a desire to remain part of community life. Many come through Community First, which provides practical, relational support – reconnection with friends and community, help with day-to-day needs and safe support following hospital discharge. Nearly a third now have a follow-up Life Map, the highest re-map rate across the three cohorts. Those follow-ups show meaningful movement for many people and give us growing evidence that practical, relational support is contributing to positive change. The Life Map does not prove causation on its own, but it helps us see and learn from change.
Maureen: What this tells me is that prevention does not look the same for everyone and cannot be built around single issues. It works best when it starts with the whole picture and is rooted in trusted relationships – not when people are sorted into service boxes.
Why interpretation matters
Andy: You’ve said data and narrative need to go together. Give me an example of where that distinction changed what you understood about what someone needed.
Maureen: Take an indicator such as I have goals and hope for the future. On paper, it is a wellbeing measure. A system seeing only that dot might conclude that the person has hope. The narrative tells us what the score actually means to them.
Maureen: An older person might score low because they are realistically planning for a future they can see coming. That is not necessarily a lack of hope; it can be dignity and preparation. Someone else might score low because they are rebuilding confidence after a setback. The same data point can therefore mean very different things. Without the narrative, we risk making assumptions. With it, the person, the practitioner and the system can understand what sits behind the score and what support would be meaningful.
What that made possible for one person
Andy: Can you give me one example of what that fuller picture actually produced for someone?
Maureen: One person we supported, whom I will call CD, is 86. He and his wife support one another. His mobility has become more difficult, and his wife is taking on more of the caring. He came to Community First asking for help with transport and getting to the shops. That was what mattered most to him at the time.
Maureen: Once we created space to ask what mattered more broadly, other pressures emerged: his hearing had worsened, his confidence had reduced and money was tight. Transport was not just transport. It affected appointments, food, access to eye and hearing care, and whether he felt able to go anywhere at all.
Maureen: Together, we agreed practical steps: community transport, meal deliveries, a home visit from the optician, support to attend the Day Centre, and an application for Pension Age Disability Payment to ease the financial pressure. Ten months later, his second Life Map showed what had changed – appointments were manageable, meals were in the freezer, his eyes and hearing had been checked at home, the payment had been awarded, and he and his wife were attending the Day Centre together.
Maureen: He tried a group activity and decided it was not for him. That was not a failure; the choice was his. Knowing he could get there if he wanted to strengthened his confidence. His new priority became ‘being active in the community’. He and his wife were not waiting for a crisis; they were thinking ahead to a time when one of them might be on their own.
Being heard differently
Andy: You are careful about not overclaiming. But you have said that Life Maps, accumulated data and lived-experience interpretation make VCEL better equipped to help change the story and, in time, the system. Where is that landing? What is happening with policymakers?
Maureen: It is beginning to land. We can now go into health inequalities or poverty discussions with Life Maps and say: this is what people are telling us matters; this is what the accumulated patterns show; and this is where the system is not joining the dots. We are not replacing stories with data. We are bringing structured data and lived experience together so that neither is stripped of context.
Maureen: There is a genuine appetite to learn more. Colleagues working on health inequalities, poverty reduction and prevention are asking: what else are you seeing, and how should this inform planning? That is important. The value is not in claiming policy change before we can evidence it; it is in widening the evidence being considered, improving the questions being asked and strengthening our shared understanding of prevention.
Andy: Can you give me one concrete example – not just a shift in conversation, but somewhere this has opened a route for East Lothian’s community insight?
Maureen: So far, SIGNAL has helped bring greater specificity into strategic discussions. Instead of staying only with broad headlines, we can show issues such as personal care and hygiene product poverty, transport barriers and caring pressures, and how they overlap in people’s lives. It takes the conversation closer to what is actually happening for people.
Maureen: I have also recently been appointed to the Scottish Government’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy Leadership Board. I would not claim that SIGNAL caused that appointment. What it provides is another route for East Lothian’s lived experience and third-sector knowledge to inform a national conversation. The credibility we bring comes from years of relationships, partnership working and practical delivery, strengthened by the structured insight that Life Maps now help us evidence.
Andy: Is VCEL the whole picture here, or is there more you’re not yet capturing?
Maureen: We do not hold the whole picture, and I would never want to suggest that we do. Some of the richest insight sits with small grassroots organisations, volunteers and community members who are alongside people every day and notice changes long before they reach a formal service. Our next task is to develop a proportionate, reciprocal way for that knowledge to be shared, connected and recognised – without extracting it or claiming it as VCEL’s. The insight belongs first to the people and communities who share it.
Maureen: None of this has been done by VCEL alone. The insight is strengthened by staff, volunteers, grassroots organisations and partners who each see different parts of the picture. SIGNAL gives us one disciplined way to connect some of that knowledge. Our responsibility as a TSI is to help it travel into planning and action – and to ensure communities can see what happened because they spoke.
It is a shift worth being precise about: this is evidence of being heard differently, not yet proof that decisions have changed. The next stage is to make the route explicit and accountable – tracing how shared insight informs the Poverty Plan, the Local Outcomes Improvement Plan, the Participation and Engagement Strategy, Whole Family Wellbeing and joint health and social care planning, rather than simply appearing in conversations around them. VCEL also needs to record what changed, what did not and what communities heard back. As a learning organisation, it is testing that route rather than assuming it.
The one thing
Andy: If you could keep just one thing from the past couple of years – one thing you want people to understand about what SIGNAL and Life Maps make possible – what would it be?
Maureen: Start with What Matters To You. That question changes the conversation. It moves us away from fitting people into service boxes and towards understanding their whole life – their strengths as well as the pressures they face. When we build a Life Map from that conversation, we can see connections the system often misses: transport is about independence; isolation is about dignity and belonging; and low confidence can be about the future someone can see ahead.
Maureen: People live horizontally, while systems often operate vertically. Our job is to help the system see the whole person without losing the person in the data.
Being heard differently is only the start. The test now is whether this changes decisions, services and funding – and whether people can see what happened because they spoke.
The next conversation should include people with lived experience directly, alongside the organisations and volunteers who support them. That is how VCEL will judge whether the bridge is working in both directions.
