Who understands the barriers to accessing support better: the person who designs a service or the person who has had to navigate it?

The answer is simple: both perspectives matter.

Professional expertise helps organisations develop effective services, establish procedures, and ensure quality standards. But lived experience reveals something that guidelines and official documents cannot always capture — what it actually feels like to seek help, navigate unfamiliar systems, and overcome barriers in everyday life.

This is why involving people with lived experience is essential when designing accessible, inclusive, and effective support services.

When Services Exist but Remain Difficult to Access

A service may appear accessible on paper. It may have clear working hours, contact information, and established procedures. Yet people who need support may still struggle to use it.

For Ukrainian refugees adapting to life in Estonia, Lithuania, or Latvia, these challenges may include language barriers, unfamiliar administrative procedures, difficulties accessing healthcare, uncertainty about available services, or fear of discrimination.

For people living with HIV, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other communities facing additional vulnerabilities, concerns about confidentiality, stigma, or previous negative experiences may create further barriers.

These difficulties are not always visible to those who design services.

A person with relevant lived experience may recognise challenges that professionals have not encountered themselves. Their perspective can help organisations understand why people hesitate to seek assistance, which procedures feel confusing, and what could make support safer and easier to access.

The Value of the Peer-Led Approach

The peer-led approach recognises that people with lived experience have valuable knowledge that can contribute to both delivering and improving support services.

Peer counsellors can offer understanding informed by their own experiences while helping others navigate difficult situations.

Their role is not to replace medical professionals, social workers, psychologists, or legal specialists. Instead, peer support complements professional services by bringing another important perspective into the process.

This approach can help build trust, improve communication, identify overlooked barriers, and make information more understandable.

For someone who is hesitant to seek assistance, speaking with a person who understands similar challenges can make the first step feel less overwhelming.

At the same time, lived experience should not be treated as a substitute for professional expertise. The strongest support systems bring these perspectives together.

Building Support with Communities, Not Only for Them

Within RefAid BaltHUB, the peer-led approach is an important part of supporting Ukrainian refugees and people in vulnerable situations across Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.

Working together, EHPV in Estonia, Association Demetra in Lithuania, and AGIHAS in Latvia combine professional knowledge, community experience, peer counselling, and service navigation to help people access relevant support.

This approach recognises that effective assistance is not only about providing information or referring someone to a service.

It is also about understanding the person’s circumstances, respecting their choices, protecting confidentiality, and recognising the barriers they may face.

Listening to people who use support services can help organisations identify gaps, improve communication, and develop approaches that respond more closely to real needs.

Importantly, meaningful participation means more than simply collecting feedback. It means recognising people’s experiences as valuable knowledge and creating opportunities for their perspectives to influence how support is provided and improved.

Listening Is Part of Inclusive Support

Inclusive support cannot be developed through procedures and professional expertise alone.

It also requires dialogue, trust, and a willingness to listen to people whose experiences may differ from those of service providers.

For RefAid BaltHUB, combining professional expertise with peer-led and community-based approaches is part of building more accessible, confidential, and non-discriminatory support for Ukrainian refugees in the Baltic countries.

Because the most effective solutions are not created only in offices, strategies, or official documents.

They also emerge through conversations with the people whose lives these services are intended to improve.

Quality support is built with people, not only for them.