What does EVA do?

Experience experts Department Arkin - EVA (formerly Pit&Co) is the department of Arkin to which all experience experts together belong. The experts by experience work in various specialties such as Mentrum, NPI and VIP. The department meets monthly for consultation and intervision.

The mission: we provide impulses and actively contribute to (the cultural change towards) recovery-supportive care for clients within Arkin. To this end, we unlock our collective experiential knowledge, use it, secure it and broaden it to other disciplines within the organization. To contribute to cultural values such as equality, openness, inclusion and diversity. In this way, we positively influence all levels and sections within Arkin, from individual clients and teams to management and policy development at the organizational level.

The core values of EVA are connection, together, democratic, equality, safety and support. These core values fit the development phase in which EVA currently finds itself. Connection is one of Arkin's core values. The other two Arkin core values are also wholeheartedly endorsed and lived out by EVA: courage and curiosity.

In addition, the national professional competence profile (BCP-E) is the starting point for work as an experiential expert.

What does an experience expert do?

1. Supporting others

• Helps people with similar issues by sharing experiences and recovery stories
• Offers hope, understanding, and recognition by showing that recovery is possible
• Supports personal growth, self-confidence and self-direction

2. Building bridges

• Narrows the gap between clients and care providers by bringing in the client's perspective
• Brings together different groups, such as care users, care providers and policymakers

3. Information and awareness

• Helps break through stigma and prejudices about, for example, mental health problems or addiction
• Ensures more understanding in society by sharing experiences in education, policy and healthcare.

4. Improving policy and assistance

• Thinks along about policy and care from the perspective of experiential knowledge
• Works on improving working methods and systems in care, education and welfare
• In addition to their own experiences, the experiential expert also uses collective experiential knowledge: the shared insights of a group of people who have experienced similar challenges

5. Professional Trading

• Uses own experiences in a professional way
• Combines experiential knowledge with methods and theories, such as recovery-oriented work and empowerment
• Takes boundaries and ethics into account in the work

An expert by experience:

• has knowledge of his own experiences and can use them appropriately
• Is empathetic, involved and has strong communication skills
• Is recovery-oriented and stimulates empowerment
• Works together with others in a team, but also guards their own role and boundaries

In short: experiential expertise is not only about personal experience, but about the
To use that experience professionally to make a difference for others and in systems such as care and policy.

Source: Professional Competence Profile Experiential Expertise (BCP-E), 2022