AASW National Excellence Awards 2025: From Lived Experience to National Recognition

I recently received news that I’ve been named a Finalist in the AASW National Excellence Awards 2025 for Social Worker of the Year, a recognition that honours lived-experience leadership and social work excellence across Australia.

It took a while for the news to sink in. These things never start with applause - they start with small steps, hard days, and moments where you’re just trying to keep someone safe, including yourself.

My path into social work wasn’t a straight line. It began long before I knew the language of systems or theory. It began as a 14 year old young carer in Egypt, trying to hold a family together after loss and illness changed everything. It began in the quiet work of surviving, adapting, and later, rebuilding a life in a new country.

Social work found me through that story. It offered a way to turn what once felt unbearable into something useful - to sit with others in their uncertainty and say, “I understand”.

Being recognised for the AASW National Excellence Awards 2025 feels deeply personal, but it’s not mine alone. It belongs to every person who’s ever trusted me with their story, every client who’s taught me what strength looks like, every colleague who’s stood beside me in this work, and every member of my family who has loved me through it all.

It also belongs to our community of lived experience practitioners and advocates who are reshaping the profession; reminding us that expertise comes in many forms, and that the systems we build must hold space for every voice, every culture, every kind of knowing.

My gratitude goes to the AASW for recognising the breadth and depth of social work across Australia, and for creating a space where lived experience leadership is seen, valued, and celebrated.

Awards like this matter because they shine light on the quiet work; the unseen hours, the listening, the small acts that ripple outward. But more than anything, they remind me why I began: To serve. To listen. To make meaning from what was once broken.

Based in Perth, WA, LEXs provides telehealth counselling across Australia for individuals, couples, and NDIS participants. Services extend to Social Work supervision, Peer Work supervision, training, and keynote speaking on men’s mental health, CaLD community wellbeing, and culturally responsive suicide prevention; helping people and organisations make mental-health care more compassionate, inclusive, and effective. LEXs provides services across Australia, supporting clients in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and beyond. To learn more about our work across Australia, visit LEXs' services.