A PWLE Voices Program
Better Together Recognitions
Recognition for the people who make real partnership possible — on every side of the table. Nominated by the community, chosen by a panel of people with lived experience.
Research partnership gets talked about as a virtue and measured as a checkbox. Somewhere in between are the people actually doing it: the person with lived experience who kept showing up to a study team that wasn’t sure what to do with her; the researcher who rebuilt a protocol after a community meeting told him it was wrong; the ally who held a door open; the person in the chair beside the patient who made the appointment possible at all.
Almost none of that work is recorded anywhere. This program exists to record it.
The four recognitions
One for each seat at the table. All four are open in every cycle.
The Expertise of Experience
For a person with lived experience.
For someone whose lived experience has changed how research gets done — by asking the question nobody had asked, by refusing a design that would not have worked, or simply by staying in a room that was not built for them until it was.
The True Partner
For a researcher.
For a researcher who treats people with lived experience as partners rather than participants — who shares decisions, budgets for the work, and changes course when the community says the course is wrong.
The Open Door
For an advocate or ally.
For the person who makes the way in for someone else — the introduction, the invitation, the seat saved, the name put forward when it would have been easier to say nothing.
The Chair Beside
For a caregiver.
For the person in the chair beside the patient. The one who drives, remembers, advocates, and absorbs — and whose contribution almost never appears in anyone’s acknowledgements.
Who decides
A rotating panel of people with lived experience selects the recipients. The program co-chairs — Laura VanAntwerp and Tom Norris — convene the process and issue what the panel decides. They do not choose.
That division is the point rather than a formality. This publication argues that a seat at the table is not the same as a vote. A recognition program run by the same people who run the newsletter would be a seat. Putting the decision with a PWLE panel is the vote.
Where either co-chair has a working relationship with someone who has been nominated, that co-chair’s recusal is triggered on receipt of the nomination — before deliberation, not during it. Recusals are logged in the program record.
How to nominate
The nomination period runs August 10 through October 31, 2026. Recipients are announced November 30.
- Anyone may nominate, including yourself. Self-nominations are welcome and are weighed by the panel on the same terms as any other nomination.
- Nominations are confidential. We will not tell a nominee they have been nominated unless they are selected.
- You do not need to write well. Twelve questions, only four of them required. If you saw work that mattered, that is enough reason to fill it out.
- Not sure which recognition fits? Say so on the form. The story you tell will make it clear.
Four ways to do it, and none of them is better than the others:
- Online — the form is at chronicpainla.com/nominate/
- On paper — print the nomination form, fill it in by hand, and photograph or scan it back to us
- By email — write to editorpwlevoices@gmail.com and answer the same questions in your own words
- By phone — email the address above and ask a co-chair to take your nomination by phone. We will write it down for you.
Every nomination, however it arrives, goes into the same pool and is reviewed on the same terms. Paper is not a lesser route.
What happens to a nomination
- It is logged on receipt, with the date it actually arrived.
- Any co-chair with a relationship to the nominee steps out at that point.
- After the period closes, the full pool goes to the PWLE panel.
- The panel deliberates and decides. The co-chairs issue what the panel decides.
- Recipients are contacted, and a citation is written with them rather than about them.
- Any category without a nomination the panel considers worthy stays open, and its nominations carry forward to the next cycle. An award nobody earned this year is not given out to fill a slot.
The first cycle, stated plainly
The first recognition issued under this program was the Stewardship Award to Sara Skelton, presented at the NIH HEAL National Pain K12 symposium in August 2026. It did not come from open nominations.
It was issued under a founding-editor provision, as a deliberate exception, because a program built to make invisible contribution visible should not hold its first act of recognition for a year while its own machinery is assembled. The four recognitions above are panel-decided, and nothing about that issuance changes the rule. You are entitled to know which is which.
The founding-editor provision sunsets on September 28, 2026. After that date, every recognition under this program comes from the panel.
What recognition is, and is not
All recognitions under this program are non-monetary. A certificate is a piece of paper. What it does is put on the record what a community decided was worth noticing.
Recognition is not a substitute for fair compensation, and this publication will keep saying so. If your work is being recognized here and not paid for elsewhere, the problem is the second thing, not the first. PWLE Voices does not accept payment for coverage or for recognition of any kind.
What is not part of this program
The editor of PWLE Voices occasionally issues an Editor’s Certificate of Appreciation. It is a separate instrument and it is worth being precise about the difference, because the difference is the whole design of this program.
- It is a personal expression of thanks from the editor, not a recognition conferred by PWLE Voices.
- It carries one signature — the editor’s — rather than the two required on every Better Together certificate.
- It is not panel-decided, and it is not nominated. No one applies for it and no one is considered for it.
- It sits outside this program entirely and confers nothing within it.
An Editor’s Certificate was issued to Jessica Alder in August 2026, for the administrative work that keeps the K12 PWLE Program at the University of Michigan running.
The reason to say all of this out loud is simple. A recognition program is only worth anything if it is clear who decided. When the editor thanks someone personally, that is the editor thanking someone personally, and it should never be mistaken for the community having spoken.
Questions about the program, or about a nomination you are thinking of making? Write to editorpwlevoices@gmail.com. A co-chair will answer.