Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

Hello, and welcome to the Madden America podcast. I'm Peter Simons, your host for today.

Today we have with us, Leacia Ostro, the founder and

CEO of Live and Learn, a research and consulting company that specializes in the inclusion of people

with lived experience. She conducts research on community-driven interventions that present safe and

effective pathways to independence and empowerment. Dr. Ostrou, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

To begin, I wanted to ask you about Live and Learn.

Can you tell me more about your company?

Yes, so I founded Live and Learn in 2015 after I finished my PhD,

and it was a small company that works with different stakeholders around the

country. So providers, administrators, policymakers, people in various different systems. But with a

particular focus on always making sure to include people with lived experience of those systems

in our work.

So we do a mix of research and consulting projects.

So the consulting work ranges from small contracts with peer-run organizations that are required

or interested in reporting their outcomes

and looking for assistance with that

to working with state and county mental health systems.

And then the research that we do is independently

investigator-initiated research like one would do in an academic setting.

So we actually just got my first multi-year federal research grant, which is funded by the National

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