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 practice of Michael Elwan. My field is lived experience leadership: whether lived and living experience actually influences the decisions an organisation makes, and whether the people carrying that work inside it have what they need to do it.
I'm an Accredited Social Worker, a state and national advisor, and a PhD candidate researching what organisations have to put in place for lived and living experience leadership to work. I'm based in Perth and work online across Australia.
Lived Experience Workforce Review | Consultancy | Supervision | Training | Keynote speaking
LEXs also provides online therapy for individuals and couples. If that is what brought you here, it is further down this page.
Whether you are here for yourself, or for the people and systems you are responsible for, you are in the right place.
When lived experience leadership is expected to influence decisions, the structure has to carry it
Many organisations have an advisory group, lived experience roles, an engagement strategy or a co-creation process. The commitment is rarely the problem.
The harder question is whether any of it changes a decision.
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Where does lived experience advice enter the organisation?
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Who has access to the people who decide?
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Who is accountable for responding to it?
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What happens when a lived experience perspective contradicts a settled position?
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Are people employed into roles that carry influence, or asked to hold responsibility without the authority to act on it?
Those are organisational questions rather than questions about participation, and they are the ones I work on.
Consultancy
The Lived Experience Workforce Review
An independent review of how lived and living experience works inside your organisation: how it enters, where it sits, how advice reaches decisions, and whether the roles and structures around it hold.
It runs at three scopes with a fixed fee at each: one structure or one question, several structures, or the full workforce. Every review ends in a written report with findings, the evidence behind them, and recommendations placed at the level that owns each one. What the board decides. What an executive decides. What a manager can start next week.
Every recommendation is marked as costed or free, so the changes that cost nothing are not held up waiting on the ones that need a budget line. Where I would recommend nothing, I say so.
Read about the Lived Experience Workforce Review
Other consultancy
Where the question does not need a full review, I take it as targeted consultancy: multicultural co-creation of services and resources, lived and living experience contribution to research and evaluation, and advice on policy, standards and system design. Culturally responsive suicide prevention runs through all three rather than sitting apart from them.
Work is scoped to a fixed fee, with a proposed scope, approach and fee back within five business days.
Supervision
Three streams, for three different positions in the work. All online, individual and group.
Social work supervision. For social workers who want supervision on the practice itself: ethics, judgement, boundaries, the decisions that are not clear-cut, and the cases that stay with you afterwards. It suits social workers in private practice with no internal supervision, people carrying complexity without a place to think about it, and new graduates building a practice framework. Where culture, language, migration or interpreter-mediated work runs through your caseload, that is a particular focus of mine rather than something added on at the end.
Lived Experience Leadership Supervision. For people leading, advising, governing or researching: senior managers, advisors and consultants, board members, senior consumer and carer representatives, and people working in policy and peaks. The questions here are usually about authority, influence and holding a position.
Supervision for peer workers and people in lived experience roles. For people doing the work: peer workers, carer consultants, lived experience advisors and practitioners, individually or as a team. Provided from a social work practice base by someone who holds lived and living experience himself. The supervision page sets out precisely what that does and does not mean.
All three run online across Australia, individually or in groups. Groups start from three people and cost less per person, which is usually how a team makes regular supervision affordable. Ongoing packages are available where you would rather book a year at once, and employers can purchase supervision for an individual or a team directly.
Training
I provide training for teams working where mental health, suicide prevention and multicultural practice meet. The focus is practical: the conversations professionals are actually asked to hold, and what changes when culture, migration, faith, masculinity, family duty and shame are in the room.
Three established programs, each able to run as it stands or be tailored to your workforce: CaLD men's mental health and suicide prevention, mental health conversations in CaLD families, and culturally responsive supervision. All three were built and refined through national AASW professional development, so they arrive tested rather than written from scratch for you.
Custom design is available where an established program does not cover the setting, and is how I usually develop refugee, migrant and settlement practice. Delivered online across Australia as a webinar, workshop, conference session, half-day or full-day program, or a multi-session series.
Keynote speaking
I speak nationally 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 to tell a personal story. It is to leave an audience with something they think differently about when they go back to the work.
Organisers usually book me when they want the lived experience session to connect to how the organisation actually runs, rather than sitting apart from the rest of the program. I draw on senior management, professional practice and doctoral research alongside my own experience, so the talk reaches the people holding budgets and decisions as well as the people in the roles.
Why organisations work with me
I hold lived and living experience as a carer and in my own right, and I have run services.
Before LEXs, I spent many years in senior management across mental health and community services. I led statewide services, multidisciplinary teams and large-scale service delivery, with responsibility for workforce, quality, operations and outcomes. I have supported services working with more than 1,600 people a year.
Before that I held the service quality and innovation portfolio for a statewide provider, and I was the inaugural contracts manager at another, sitting on a portfolio spanning mental health, disability, youth, housing and family services.
That experience matters because recommendations have to survive contact with the organisation that is expected to implement them. I have been responsible for services, people, quality, contracts and budgets, and I understand what happens when a recommendation moves from a report into an executive meeting and then into operational reality.
My doctoral research at Charles Sturt University asks the question this work is built on: what an organisation actually has to put in place for lived and living experience leadership to work.
I do not assume that a lived experience perspective automatically makes a structure effective. I look at what an organisation says it does, what its structures permit, what people inside it experience, and where those three diverge.
I work in English and Arabic, and I pay close attention to who a structure leaves out before anyone notices they are missing.
For individuals
LEXs provides online therapy for individuals and couples across Australia, in English, in Arabic, or in both. Individual sessions run for 60 minutes by secure video, couples sessions for 90 minutes, with no GP referral needed. You can book directly online.
Most people who sit down with me are carrying something that has been heavy for a while: burnout, grief, the long shadow of migration, strain in a relationship, or the quiet exhaustion of holding a family together. You do not need a diagnosis, a referral, or the perfect words to begin.
A first session is a conversation. What has brought you here, what you are hoping will change, and whether working together feels right. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
If you would rather talk before booking, you can book a free 15-minute fit call. It is a conversation about whether working together feels right, not a therapy session.
Individual therapy | Couples therapy | Therapy in Arabic | NDIS telehealth social work
Book a session/15 minutes Fit call
Recognition
Between 2025 and 2026, my work and LEXs have been recognised through:
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the AASW National Excellence Awards (Social Worker of the Year)
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the WA Mental Health Award (Lived Experience Impact and Inspiration)
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the Suicide Prevention Australia LiFE Awards (Outstanding Contribution, WA; Priority Populations, WA), and
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the WA Multicultural Awards (Outstanding Individual Achievement).
I have also been a finalist in:
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the R U OK? Barbara Hocking Memorial Awards and
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the Sir Ronald Wilson Leadership Award.
I have spoken at national conferences, contributed to research translation with the ALIVE National Centre, and published in peer-reviewed literature.
