Lived Experience Solutions (LEXs)
Lived experience leadership across Australia
Workforce reviews, consultancy, supervision, training and keynote speaking for organisations across mental health, suicide prevention and community services
Lived Experience Solutions (LEXs) is the Perth-based practice of Michael Elwan, an Accredited Social Worker and PhD candidate. LEXs works with organisations across Australia on lived experience leadership: whether lived and living experience actually influences decisions, and whether the roles and structures around that work are supported to function. Services include the Lived Experience Workforce Review, consultancy, supervision, multicultural mental health training and keynote speaking.
Lived Experience Workforce Review | Consultancy | Supervision | Training | Keynote speaking
LEXs also provides online therapy for individuals and couples across Australia, in English and Arabic.
What is lived experience leadership?
Lived experience leadership is not simply having people with lived experience in the room. It is whether lived and living experience has enough authority, access and organisational support to influence what happens next.
An organisation may have advisory groups, peer or lived experience roles, engagement strategies and co-creation processes and still struggle to show what changed because those structures existed. The issue is often not commitment. It is the organisational conditions around the work.
That is the question LEXs works on: where lived experience enters an organisation, how it reaches decision-making, what supports the people carrying it, and what the organisation can evidence about its influence.
When lived experience is expected to influence decisions, the structure has to carry it
The questions are usually practical:
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Where does lived experience advice enter the organisation?
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Who has access to the people who make decisions?
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Who is accountable for responding when advice is given?
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Can people see what happened after they contributed?
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What happens when lived experience knowledge challenges an established position?
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Are roles properly classified, supervised, resourced and positioned?
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Is responsibility matched by enough authority to act?
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Who is consistently absent from the structures intended to hear from them?
Those are organisational questions rather than questions about participation alone.
They are where my consultancy work begins.
Who is Michael Elwan?
I am Michael Elwan, Founder and Director of Lived Experience Solutions, an Accredited Social Worker and PhD candidate at Charles Sturt University.
I hold lived and living experience as a long-term family carer and in my own right. I was born in Alexandria, Egypt, came to Australia in my late twenties and work in English and Arabic.
Before LEXs, I spent many years in senior management across mental health and community services. I led ten statewide services and approximately seventy-five staff, with responsibility for workforce, quality, operations and outcomes across $30 million in service delivery, supporting services working with more than 1,600 people a year.
Earlier, I held responsibility for service quality and innovation for a statewide provider and worked as the inaugural contracts manager at another organisation, with responsibility for a $53.2 million portfolio spanning mental health, disability, youth, housing and family services.
I include those numbers because organisational recommendations have to survive contact with the organisation expected to implement them. I understand what happens when an idea moves from a report into an executive meeting, a budget decision and then operational reality.
My doctoral research asks what organisations actually have to put in place for lived and living experience leadership to work.
Current advisory, governance and research work includes roles with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, the Office of the Chief Psychiatrist in Western Australia and the ALIVE National Centre.
Lived Experience Workforce Review
The Lived Experience Workforce Review is the clearest starting point when an organisation needs an independent answer before deciding what to change.
It examines how lived and living experience works in practice: how it enters the organisation, where it sits, whether advice reaches the people who decide, and whether the roles and structures around it hold. Depending on scope, this can include advisory groups, governance pathways, lived experience roles, peer workforces, supervision, classification, remuneration and organisational accountability.
Every review ends in a written report setting out the findings, the evidence behind them and recommendations placed at the level responsible for acting on each one. Recommendations distinguish between changes requiring resources and those that can begin without a new budget line.
The review is informed by the National Lived Experience (Peer) Workforce Development Guidelines as its principal national reference point.
Read about the Lived Experience Workforce Review
Lived experience consultancy
Not every organisational question requires a formal review.
LEXs consultancy works across five connected areas:
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Lived Experience Workforce Reviews
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Multicultural co-creation of services, resources and programs
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Lived and living experience in research and evaluation
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Policy, standards and system design
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Organisational capability development
An engagement can begin with an independent assessment, a problem the organisation has already identified, or something it already knows it needs to build.
The focus remains practical: who has authority, what is resourced, where accountability sits, how decisions are made, who can realistically participate, and whether the resulting structure can be implemented and sustained.
Other consultancy is quoted as a fixed fee after scoping, with the scope, approach, deliverables and fee agreed before the work begins.
Explore lived experience consultancy
Online supervision
LEXs provides three supervision streams for three different kinds of work. All are delivered online across Australia.
Social Work Supervision
Online Social Work Supervision is reflective professional supervision for social workers across private practice, mental health, community services, government, policy and leadership.
Supervision can hold complex practice, ethics, judgement, boundaries, professional identity, cultural context, vicarious trauma, organisational pressure and the decisions that are difficult to think through inside line management. Individual supervision can be self-funded or funded by an employer.
Where migration, culture, bilingual practice, lived and living experience or leadership runs through the work, those contexts can be held as part of supervision rather than treated as side issues.
Explore social work supervision
Lived Experience Leadership Supervision
Lived Experience Leadership Supervision is specialist supervision for senior lived experience leaders, advisors, consultants, researchers and governance practitioners whose work draws on lived and living experience.
The work at this level can carry particular questions about authority, disclosure, representational labour, organisational influence, ethics, co-option and sustainability. Supervision provides somewhere to examine those decisions without requiring senior lived experience practice to be translated into a clinical or managerial framework first.
Explore lived experience leadership supervision
External Reflective Supervision for Frontline Teams
External Reflective Supervision for Frontline Teams is an organisational service for teams working across mental health, suicide prevention, psychosocial support, disability and community services.
It is suitable for multidisciplinary teams including support workers, rehabilitation workers, peer workers, lived experience practitioners and other human-service staff. Participants do not need to be social workers.
The focus is reflective rather than managerial: complex practice, judgement, boundaries, emotional load, culture, risk, role clarity and what workers are carrying from the work.
Standard organisational groups run for 90 minutes with up to six participants.
Explore frontline team supervision
Explore all supervision services
Multicultural mental health training
LEXs training focuses on the practice moments that become more complex when mental health, suicide prevention and culture meet.
The aim is not to teach cultural facts. It is to help practitioners make better judgements when migration, masculinity, family roles, faith, shame, grief, stigma and service systems shape what happens in the room.
Three established programs are available:
1. CaLD men's mental health and suicide prevention
For teams wanting to strengthen engagement with culturally and linguistically diverse men, particularly where distress may be communicated indirectly, help-seeking may happen late or expectations around masculinity, family responsibility, spirituality and shame shape the conversation.
2. Mental health conversations in CaLD families
For teams working with families across migration, stigma, belonging, family roles and intergenerational differences, with practical approaches to opening conversations that can otherwise remain difficult or unnamed.
3. Culturally responsive supervision
For supervisors, managers and practice leads wanting to strengthen supervision when culture, identity, belonging, feedback and power shape the supervisory relationship.
Programs can be commissioned in their established form or tailored to the workforce and setting. Custom design is also available where an organisation needs something outside these programs, particularly across refugee, migrant and settlement-related practice.
Training is delivered online across Australia.
Explore multicultural mental health training
Keynote speaking
I speak on lived and living experience, mental health, suicide prevention, migration, multicultural practice and the distance between what organisations intend and what people experience.
The aim is not simply to tell a personal story. It is to leave an audience with something they understand differently when they return to the work.
I draw on lived and living experience alongside social work practice, senior management and doctoral research. That allows a keynote to speak to the people holding organisational authority and budgets as well as the people delivering services or carrying lived experience roles.
For individuals
LEXs also provides online therapy for individuals and couples across Australia, in English, Arabic or both.
Much of my therapy work sits with grief and loss, suicide bereavement, men's mental health, migration and identity, burnout, relationship strain and the long-term effects of carrying responsibility for others.
You do not need a diagnosis, GP referral or perfect explanation of what is wrong to begin.
A first session is a conversation about what has brought you here, what you want to be different and whether working together feels right. From there, we decide what the work needs to become.
If you would rather talk before booking, a free 15-minute fit call is available. It is a conversation about fit, not a therapy session.
Individual therapy | Couples therapy | Therapy in Arabic | NDIS telehealth social work
Book a session or 15 minutes Fit call
Recognition and publications
My work and LEXs have been recognised through national and state awards across social work, mental health, suicide prevention and multicultural leadership, including:
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2025 AASW Social Worker of the Year
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2025 WA Mental Health Award, Lived Experience Impact & Inspiration
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2026 Suicide Prevention Australia LiFE Award, Outstanding Contribution
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2026 Suicide Prevention Australia LiFE Award, Priority Populations for LEXs
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2026 WA Multicultural Award, Outstanding Individual Achievement
My peer-reviewed publications include sole-authored work in Psychiatric Services (American Psychiatric Association - APA) and the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, and co-authored research in the Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Mental Health.
I have also spoken at national conferences and contribute to lived experience research translation through the ALIVE National Centre.
Not sure where to start?
If your organisation wants to know whether an existing lived experience structure is working, start with the Lived Experience Workforce Review.
If you already understand the problem and need help changing a policy, structure, service, research process or engagement approach, start with consultancy.
If the issue is practice or workforce capability, see supervision or training.
If you are looking for therapy, you can book directly.
If you are still not sure, get in touch and tell me what you are trying to solve.
Frequently asked questions
What does Lived Experience Solutions (LEXs) do?
LEXs works with organisations on lived experience leadership: whether lived and living experience influences decision-making, and whether the roles, structures and organisational conditions around that work are strong enough to function in practice.
LEXs also provides online therapy for individuals and couples.
What is a Lived Experience Workforce Review?
A Lived Experience Workforce Review is an independent organisational review of how lived and living experience works in practice. It examines where lived experience sits, how advice reaches decisions, what supports the workforce and what the organisation can evidence about its influence.
LEXs offers focused, multi-structure and full-workforce reviews.
Does LEXs work outside Western Australia?
Yes. LEXs is based in Perth and works online with individuals, practitioners and organisations across Australia.
Can an organisation commission supervision for workers who are not social workers?
Yes. External Reflective Supervision for Frontline Teams is designed for multidisciplinary teams across mental health, suicide prevention, psychosocial support, disability and community services. Participants do not need to hold a social work qualification.
Can an organisation start with a small piece of consultancy?
Yes. A full Workforce Review is not always necessary. Consultancy can begin with one defined organisational question, an existing structure that needs strengthening, or something the organisation already knows it needs to build.
Does LEXs work with government, universities and research organisations?
Yes. Consultancy can be commissioned by government bodies, mental health and suicide prevention services, community organisations, universities, research centres and other organisations working with lived and living experience.
