Looking back, I remember receiving help from a nonprofit organization as a victim of human trafficking and domestic violence. That support restored my hope and helped me see a future again. For many foreign-born nationals who experience trafficking or domestic violence, immigration relief is one of the most critical needs, yet the process is often long, complex, and filled with rejection and misunderstanding. My own journey through that system shaped the way I now serve victims and survivors. I approach every person I support with the same care I once needed myself.
Out of gratitude, I offered to share my story. I wrote a letter to the nonprofit organization that had supported me, expressing my willingness to speak to help others. My first opportunity to share my story publicly came through that organization. They later informed me that they had been invited by Winona State University to present and asked if I would be willing to join them. I traveled to the event with one of their pro bono lawyers, and together we shared both the legal and lived experience perspectives. That invitation opened the door to many more speaking engagements at universities, colleges, fundraising events, and community gatherings.
As I continued sharing my story in different spaces, I began to notice a pattern. While audiences were moved and inspired, the emotional toll on me was significant. I was often left drained and retraumatized for days afterward. At the same time, I struggled financially, trying to balance public speaking with the realities of supporting myself and my child. It began to feel as though I was being asked to perform my trauma while others benefited from the platform and the recognition. I was not a performer, and I was not a story. I was a human being trying to rebuild a life.
I also began to notice how easily I was being reduced to my lived experience. People were deeply interested in the story, but not always in me as a professional, a thinker, or a contributor. Once the performance ended, so did the relationship. Over time, this made clear that storytelling alone, no matter how powerful, was not enough to create sustainable professional opportunities or meaningful systems change.
After publishing my memoir, Imprisoned: The Travails of a Trafficked Victim, I continued to stand in front of audiences and tell my story from beginning to end. During one engagement at a state college, a Diversity and Inclusion director offered advice that would later prove transformative. He told me that I did not need to share every detail of my story, but rather just enough to encourage people to engage more deeply and learn the rest through my work. At the time, I did not know how to apply that advice in practice. Even with a journalism background, I had not yet learned how to translate lived experience into professional strategy.
That learning came gradually through observation, training, reflection, and engagement within and outside academic settings. Over time, I began to understand that lived experience becomes professional expertise when it moves beyond narrative and into structure, systems, and solutions. Story becomes skill. Skill becomes strategy. Strategy becomes systems impact.
I learned how to use my experience not only to tell a story, but to inform programs, shape policies, and advise institutions. Today, I use lived experience as a foundation for delivering strategic guidance to government entities and organizations both within and beyond the United States.
Storytelling remains powerful. It humanizes complex issues, reduces isolation for victims and survivors, and helps the public understand that real people are affected by real systems. For organizations doing the work, lived experience can be a vital source of insight for improving services and outcomes.
However, storytelling can also cause harm when it is not grounded in dignity, structure, and purpose. Survivors are often treated with pity rather than respect, compassion rather than professional regard. I have experienced moments where people cried in front of me while I was not crying, where they centered their emotions instead of engaging me as a colleague or expert. Others struggled to move beyond paternalistic behavior, seeing me through the lens of trauma rather than through the lens of competence, capability, and contribution. This is the danger of reducing lived experience to narrative alone.
True professional translation of lived experience requires structure. Just as a house is built with a foundation and strengthened one block at a time, professional expertise is built through learning, systems thinking, strategic planning, and continuous development. It requires maintenance through growth, adaptation, and mindset shifts.
To support this transition, I developed professional tools such as a speaker kit and structured service offerings that clearly defined how I could contribute beyond storytelling. Today, I still share parts of my story, but I do so intentionally and strategically, using lived experience as illustration rather than performance.
More importantly, I learned to focus on where change actually happens. Through listening, observation, and engagement, I discovered that the most meaningful influence often occurs behind the scenes through advisory roles, program development, policy work, and systems design. It is in these spaces that decisions are made that shape people’s lives. Serving on the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking and working with agencies such as the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Family are some examples that allowed me to collaborate with other SMEs with lived experience, nonprofits, and government leaders to influence policies and programs that create long-term impact.
This work is quieter, but it is powerful. It is where lived experience becomes expertise and expertise becomes transformation.
Overreliance on trauma storytelling alone often leads to burnout, emotional exhaustion, and re-traumatization. It centers emotion rather than strategy and sympathy rather than solutions. When lived experience is translated into advisory capacity, systems thinking, and professional contribution, it becomes a source of healing, sustainability, and long-term impact.
For SMEs with lived experience, this shift requires moving from story-centered identity to solution-centered expertise. It means developing services, not just speeches. It means learning the language of systems, policy, outcomes, and impact. It means building capacity, structure, and credibility alongside visibility. It means measuring results, not reactions.
For buyers, it requires engaging SMEs with lived experience as professionals, not performers. It means compensating expertise, not emotion. It means including lived experience voices in planning, design, and evaluation, not only in storytelling spaces. It means valuing behind-the-scenes advisory roles as much as public-facing engagement.
When lived experience is translated into professional expertise, survivors are no longer reduced to their trauma. They become architects of solutions, contributors to systems change, and partners in building stronger programs, smarter policies, and more ethical institutions. This transformation is not only essential for the sustainability of survivor-led businesses, but also for the effectiveness, integrity, and impact of the systems meant to serve communities.
At Bukola Oriola Group (BOG), LLC, we believe that this shift from storytelling to strategy is not just necessary. It is foundational to ethical engagement, meaningful inclusion, and lasting systems change.
