Melinda Karp
The Center to Advance Consumer Partnership
From intent to impact: Creating a roadmap to engage people with lived experience in your own work
Pre-conference offering at Putting Care at the Center 2026
Annual conference
Oakland Marriott City Center, Oakland, CA 2-5 pm PT
Community & consumer engagement Strengthening ecosystems of care
Hosted by
Community engagement (CE) is a powerful tool for organizations and communities that want to create lasting and positive change. When done well, CE builds trust, reduces health disparities, creates cost-savings and efficiencies for organizations, and leads to healthy and thriving communities. Despite this potential, many implementation challenges arise as organizations and people with lived experience (PWLE) endeavor to work together. During this interactive, hands-on workshop participants will reflect on the current state of how their organizations builds partnerships with PWLE and build a custom roadmap to strengthen their work through impactful and feasible practices – rooted in the success of other organizations across the country.
Session level: Intermediate
Who should attend: People who work to meaningfully engage people with lived experience (PWLE) in designing, delivering, or evaluating health and social care programs. This includes PWLE themselves, health and social care leaders, program managers, supervisors, executive leaders, community engagement professionals, quality improvement staff, and researchers.
Capacity: Registration required beforehand; capacity is limited.
Cost:
Session objectives
In the first part of this workshop, participants will:
- Learn the background of the INSPIRE partnership, a collaborative and coordinated team committed to advancing the practice of authentic CE
- Explore INSPIRE’s framework for engaging PWLE to build successful person-centered design, delivery, and evaluation approaches for health and social care programs
- Take a brief assessment to understand how their organization’s engagement programs and practices stack up against the framework, and identify 1-2 focus areas
During the second part of the workshop, participants will:
- Work in small groups with other participants -aligned with their chosen focus areas for growing their engagement with PWLE
- With facilitator and peer-to-peer support, build a custom roadmap for growing their organizations work with PWLE that feel both feasible and impactful.
- Have the chance to share their roadmaps with the full group
About the facilitators
Melinda Karp
Melinda has nearly thirty years of experience as a leader in the health care sector, developing innovative approaches to transform health care experience and outcomes through the authentic engagement of people with lived experience. She has worked with health plans, public agencies, community-based organizations, and care systems to create structures, practices, and cultures of consumer and community partnership.
Melinda is a co-founder and the President and CEO of the Center to Advance Consumer Partnership (CACP) where she leads the organization in delivering on its mission to drive meaningful and enduring change in health care by embedding the real-world insights of people with lived experience into every level of organizational decision-making. She holds an MBA in Health Care Management and Policy from Boston University and a BA in Psychology from Duke University.
Evelyne Kane
Camden Coalition
Evelyne Kane
Evelyne Kane serves as Associate Director for Community Engagement & Capacity Building at the Camden Coalition. In this role, she focuses on ensuring that lived experience is centered in health and social care systems, programs, and policies. She is honored to work alongside community leaders from across the U.S. through the National Consumer Scholars program, to support partnerships between complex care organizations and people with lived experience through Amplify: A consumer voices bureau, and to lead national strategies to advance authentic community engagement through the work of INSPIRE. Previously, Evelyne worked to improve access to public benefits and build out community engagement infrastructure at Benefits Data Trust, and supported community-driven social care at Penn Medicine’s Center for Community Health Workers. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Rider University and a Master of Public Health from Temple University. Evelyne is a mom of two young children, an avid traveler, and deeply committed to advancing health and social justice.
Lindsey Galli
PFCCpartners
Lindsey Galli
Lindsey Galli is the Vice President of Programs at PFCCpartners, where she champions equitable collaboration between healthcare stakeholders—patients, family caregivers, healthcare providers, and communities. Through her leadership, Lindsey empowers healthcare organizations to build authentic partnerships that drive meaningful improvements in care delivery and patient outcomes.
In 2016, Lindsey’s personal journey as a patient, following a nine-day hospitalization due to multiple blood clots in her lungs and leg, profoundly shaped her dedication to transforming healthcare. This pivotal experience deepened her commitment to ensuring that patients and caregivers have a voice in shaping their care—whether at the bedside or in boardroom discussions.
Today, Lindsey combines her lived experience with professional expertise to design and implement innovative programs that foster genuine collaboration in healthcare. Her efforts span the development of patient and family engagement strategies nationwide, creating systems where every stakeholder contributes to advancing equity and improving outcomes.
Rebecca Esparza
Lived Experience Expert
Rebecca Esparza
Rebecca Esparza, MBA, is a two-time cancer survivor (ovarian and thyroid). She has traveled all over the world to represent cancer survivors at various cancer advocacy activities, speaking engagements, committees, and forums. Her long-term survivorship of ovarian cancer (20 years) has motivated her to speak up for the underserved and marginalized; especially those without access to healthcare and/or health insurance. As a cancer patient who has experienced a cancer diagnosis with no health insurance, she has assisted countless patients and caregivers access services and programs to assist in their personal journeys. Her passion is making life better for children, whether it’s lovingly spoiling her two nephews or helping dreams come true for critically ill children through her volunteer work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Stephanie Burdick
Lived Experience Expert
Stephanie Burdick
Stephanie Burdick is a vocal advocate and survivor of traumatic brain injury in Salt Lake City, Utah. With a public health degree from Brigham Young University, Stephanie uses both her education and lived experience to add capacity to the movement for health equity. Through collaboration with community health workers and other advocates in Utah, she has been able to see the impact of community-centered decision making. Other areas of advocacy include: improving the value of Medicaid and making social service programs widely accessible; reframing the narrative about social service beneficiaries; and most recently identifying and addressing causes of mistrust. Stephanie finds purpose through channeling her pain into systems change; she finds solace in her faith, and she finds joy in hiking Utah’s beautiful mountains with family and friends.