Chapin Hall

Zines Reveal How Lived Experts Experience Co-Design in OPT-In for Families

What We Did

Launched by the Doris Duke Foundation, the Opportunities for Prevention & Transformation Initiative, or “OPT-In for Families,” builds on work done across the country to create and test a meaningful alternative to the child welfare system. OPT-In consists of four integrated core components—access, engagement, navigation, and support—guided by co-design as a foundational principle. The goal is to connect families screened out of the Child Protective Services hotline with voluntary community supports and financial assistance. Co-design with lived experts is a foundation of this initiative. To learn how people experienced the co-design process, Chapin Hall researchers asked 54 Advisory members across three sites to create zines: handmade booklets combining drawings, collage, photographs, and handwritten text. Advisory members used the zines to say (in their own words and images) what co-design asks of everyone involved.

Each Advisory session opened with a Gallery Walk, where members wrote reflections on four co-design domains:

• decision-making and governance
• representation
• partner support and development
• trust and relationships

Members then spent 40 to 60 minutes making zines in response to prompts about their motivations, experiences, and recommendations. A facilitated share-out closed each session. Advisory members with lived experience served as “coauthor reviewers,” shaping how findings were communicated in the final report.

What We Found

• Members joined because of lived experience, a sense of personal responsibility, and the belief that something better is possible for families. Their motivations were largely relational and moral, not professional.
• Participation was meaningful and relationally affirming. Sustaining it took emotional effort.
• Relational trust often exceeded structural clarity. Members reported feeling heard during meetings yet were less certain about how their input influenced broader initiative decisions.
• Members defined co-design as shared work, not consultation. It means listening paired with visible action, an iterative process, relational integrity, and accountability to lived experience.
• The strongest evidence of successful co-design was that advisory members felt they built trusting, intentional relationships from this experience.
• Members wanted greater transparency about governance and how decisions were made.

What It Means

Advisory members value the initiative, and they are calling for more transparency and evidence on how they contribute to the co-design process. Recommendations include:

• Map the decision pathway: Share in plain language where Advisory input enters, which decisions members can influence, and where final authority sits.
• Report back on input: Use a brief written update or agenda item to show how Advisory input shaped each implementation decision and why.
• Document influence: Track concrete examples of how lived experience expertise shaped priorities, adapted language, or changed decisions, and make them visible.
• Prepare members in advance: Provide agendas and background in plain language, clarify roles at the outset, and keep compensation consistent and timely.
• Protect time for relationships: Connection is the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

Zines gave Advisory members a way to author their own stories and interpret their own experiences. This creative method was effective in gathering qualitative data that will shape the next phases of the OPT-In initiative. This collaboration between Foster America and Chapin Hall shows how organizations can authentically and creatively partner with lived experts to inform research and find solutions for children and families.

Contact

Chapin Hall brings decades of experience helping partners build systems with families rather than around them. For more information about this research, contact Oriana Leach.

Read the report