031: Payment for Involvement - When Compensation Affects Benefits

About this episode

The episode discusses the implications of compensating individuals for their involvement and its potential impact on their government benefits.

What happens when you compensate people for their involvement, but doing so negatively impacts their eligibility for government benefits? Together, we'll unpack why paying people for their lived experience is the right thing to do , but also explore the challenges of doing this effectively without disrupting people's benefits . This is something we've been grappling with as an organisation for the last six months, and over the course of this three part mini-series we'll be sharing everything we've learned along the way. p.s. Keep a look out for the launch of our free 'Payment for Involvement Playbook'. Designed to help you create a fair payment for involvement policy for your organisation. Hosts: Julia Fausing and Rachel Krengel, The Social Change Agency Theme music by Loyalty Freak Music

Topics covered

• compensation
• government benefits
• lived experience
• social policy

Keywords

• payment for involvement
• benefits eligibility
• social change
• policy development

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Payment for Involvement Playbook

Books & works: Payment for Involvement

More episodes of The Social Change Pod

• 034: Rethinking Funding: Why Put Your Trust in Place-Based Groups · May 19, 2026 · 48 min
• 033: Paying People Fairly: Building Trust and Equity · November 13, 2025 · 34 min
• 032: Fair Pay for Lived Experience: Lessons from Bristol City Council · October 8, 2024 · 24 min
• 030: Join our board as a Non-Executive Director · April 5, 2023 · 13 min
• 029: We're in this together - Reflecting on movement trends in 2023 · February 21, 2023 · 20 min
• 028: What makes an effective protest movement with James Ozden from Social Change Lab · October 31, 2022 · 25 min