Jenn Thompson

There is a difference between having an opinion about a system and speaking with authority about what it is like to navigate it.

If you have never relied on a service, never sat through its intake process or waited on its waitlist, and never lived with the consequences when it fails, be careful about telling the families who have what "the truth" is — or isn't.

This matters more when you have a platform. When an influencer with an audience says a system is working, or that families' concerns are unfounded, or that a barrier doesn't exist, people believe it. Other families believe it. Decision-makers believe it. And the families actually living it are left fighting the system and the story being told about it.

Research matters. Professional expertise matters. Policy knowledge matters. Lived experience matters too.

You can support an agency and still take families seriously when they tell you something is broken. You can respect the people working inside a system without assuming the system always works the way it's supposed to.

You don't have to have lived it to care about it. But if you haven't, don't speak over the people who have, and don't use your platform to make broad claims about families' experiences that you can't support with evidence.

When their experience conflicts with what you assumed, start by asking why, not by speaking over them.

When you learn that what you have been asking for already exists and someone else has built it, you don't change your message - you support their work or you move on.