Graduated Fellows

In partnership with The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Canada, the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health kicked off the fifth cohort of the LET(s)Lead Academy on September 16, 2021, with 12 emerging leaders with lived experience. After ten weeks of classes about transformational leadership, mental health advocacy, and cultural humility and justice, Fellows engaged with mentors to create a transformational community project to use their newly developed leadership skills in their local area. The academy met monthly for leadership development and project support until graduation in May 2022.

Camille (she/her) is a Master of Psychology student and Certified Peer Support Worker in Toronto, Canada. She has been involved in the mental health community for over 10 years and is passionate about advocacy, social justice, and improving access to services for diverse mental health communities.

Mental health and addiction have been the overarching themes of my life. Today I live in the solution uncovered by over a decade of persistently unravelling the issues at the core of my ailments. I wouldn’t have made it without the guidance of my peers and several therapists at CAMH.

Despite being a run-away immigrant from Romania with a seemingly bad drinking problem, I graduated Cum Laude from York University (2006) wanting to become useful to others, as a psychotherapist. Therefore, I am here to share my lived experience and to symbiotically create a powerful force for change. One of my hopes is to help underprivileged women become the makers of their own dignified future, despite their past.

Like all of us, I have many hats: recovery peer, AA member, avid pet lover, person with chronic illness, supportive friend, loving partner, comedienne, and self-proclaimed academic!

Adam is a researcher, speaker, health enthusiast, and striving stoic philosopher. From a young age, he encountered physical and mental health challenges.

Paired with a passion for scientific research and a BSc. Honors degree in Kinesiology and Health Sciences, his experiences motivated him to learn and implement evidence-based strategies to achieve optimal health. These include the use of exercise, nutrition, meditation, sleep, and positive daily habits adjunctive to traditional psychiatric interventions. His goals are severalfold: Research the effects of nutrition therapy on mental health, blur the lines between mental and physical health, and integrate dietetics & exercise therapy into standard treatment.

He sits on the CAMH Youth Advisory Group, Centre for Youth Bipolar Disorder Youth Advisory Council, is a Research & Content Development Coordinator for the Luminate Mental Health Conference Series, and is currently in the review process of his first primary authorship research paper.

​​Lucie Langford (she/her/hers) is a Master of Health Sciences (MHSc) student in Toronto, Canada who works to innovate healthcare through research. Her research is informed by her own lived experience and focuses on serious mental illness. Lucie deeply believes in patient-centric models of research and care. She uses this unique engagement approach with her community to develop new questions. In her spare time, Lucie is an avid cyclist and passionate volunteer.

Taryn Lee is an artist and part-time youth art teacher at a private school in downtown Toronto. She has a Bachelor of Design from Ryerson University in Fashion Communication.

At 18 years old, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has worked hard at recovery and maintaining stability ever since. She’s participated in bipolar research studies and taken courses on anxiety, CBT, depression, and bipolar disorder at CAMH.

She is an active Workman Arts member and loves the welcoming creative community it provides. In 2020, she exhibited 3 juried artworks in the Workman Arts Being Scene show. Through lived experience, she realizes how deeply connected creating art helps maintain her mental health. She believes art and creativity can be used as expression, tools for healing, building confidence and fostering community. It is her hope to share her passion for the arts with others on their own mental health journeys and uncover the creativity that lies within each of us.

Susana Meza (she/they) is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist and facilitator from Maracaibo, Venezuela. Susana holds an Audiovisual Journalism diploma from La Universidad del Zulia. They are an Active Listener for Workman Arts, a Newcomer Artist Ambassador for MABELLEarts, and a member of the board of directors of the North York Women Centre.

Susana has facilitated visual arts and creative writing workshops for various local communities and currently facilitates Art Cart sessions for the Geriatric Inpatient Services of CAMH. Susana works on her daily art practice from her home studio and her poetry, even though unpublished, has been featured often by Writers Collective of Canada (WCC).

Miranda Newman is a writer and editor based in Toronto (Tkaronto), ON. Her work has appeared in Broadview Magazine, Xtra, The Walrus, and more.

Drawing upon her lived experience, Miranda primarily writes about mental health covering topics like borderline personality disorder, agoraphobia, eating disorders, suicide in children, and more. She's co-editor of a yearly arts and letter publication and publishes Life as a Lunatic, a monthly newsletter about coping with symptoms of trauma and mental illness.

Miranda is a youth advisor to CAMH's Client Learning Fund (CLF), a bursary program that provides financial aid to clients enrolled in educational and personal development courses, and a volunteer member of CAMH's National Youth Action Council (NYAC).

Kenzie Osborne is a recipe developer, health coach, and chef in Toronto, Ontario. She has lived experience with anorexia nervosa and has since used her culinary education to help promote food and body positivity within the community. She has interviewed over 40 chefs across the world to share their stories and raise awareness about the therapeutic role of food and cooking.

Her goal is to raise awareness about the power of food in terms of: identifying with culture, expressing creativity, exploring history, promoting social interactions, and benefitting overall physical and mental health. She hopes to help others overcome food-related challenges and encourage food to be a positive component in their lives.

Shantell or Shan (pronouns: she/he) is a 2-spirit urban Inuk with Mi’kmaw and Canadian ancestry. Shan grew up on the land with many traditional teachings, but outside of the community.

Raised in a nomadic forager/hunter/farmer family throughout the Atlantic provinces and British Columbia, she had no fixed address throughout much of her childhood. She currently resides on the Haldimand Tract in Kitchener, Ontario.

Shan reindigenizes by claiming the heritage denied to her by Canada’s ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. She is learning about human trafficking, de-escalation, trauma responses, anger management, mindfulness, harm reduction, advocacy, traditional Inuit philosophy, and how to deal with police through the Alluriarniq program at Tungasuvvingat Inuit in Ottawa.

When she's not hanging out with her chinchillas, she is an advocate, land defender, storyteller, performer, writer, forager, and multidisciplinary artist made of go-go-go! Her work has been published in several literary journals, academic journals, art magazines, and anthologies, and her visual art has been shown in art galleries, museums, and quirky little coffee shops and pubs. You can find more of Shantell’s work on IG: @shanmonster or on her blog: http://shanmonster.dreamwidth.org.

Hajar is a 4th-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto Scarborough doing a double major in Mental Health Studies and Political Science. She currently works as a research assistant at Women’s College Hospital in their Reproductive Health & HIV branch and is a Youth Policy Advocate with OCIC’s Youth Policy-Makers Hub. Her work is shaped by an intersectional lens, gained from engagements spanning youth mental health and policy spaces. She is passionate about using her experiences to support youth advocacy and transform systems.

I have a genuine passion for combining my extensive training as a multi-disciplined artist/musician, along with my dedication to community engagement. I am interested in building programs that promote the arts as therapeutic tools for healing and recovery.

I have extensive experience working with those challenged by addictions and mental health as well as working with Toronto’s homeless LGBTQ+2S community. I am particularly proud of my involvement in helping create The 519’s Breaking The Ice (BTI) project, which is a community engagement and outreach program focused on supporting people who use crystal meth in Toronto’s Downtown East and has a specific focus on understanding the needs and barriers faced by LGBTQ2S people who use drugs.

Martha Barbone received her BS and DVM from Colorado State University. She spent twelve years in the US Air Force before being sidelined by a diagnosis of depression and PTSD. After several years including multiple hospitalizations, medications, and other treatments, she was introduced to peer support. This led to newfound hope and discovery of inner strength. She served as the director of the Certified Peer Specialist (CPS) Training for Massachusetts for four years. Martha has also worked providing peer support in an inpatient locked unit and in a peer-run organization. In addition to CPS training, Martha is a certified Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) facilitator, Alternatives to Suicide Facilitator, Hearing Voices Network facilitator, SAMHSA Recovery to Practice Next Steps facilitator and a Vet-to-Vet group facilitator. Martha serves on the advisory board for the National Center on Advancing Person-Centered Practices and Systems (NCAPPS) and served as a member of the Recovery Advisory Board and the Veterans' Engagement Stakeholder Council for the VA Healthcare and Implementation Research (CHOIR) program. She also facilitates Alternatives to Violence workshops in several state prisons. Currently she is on the training team for the Wildflower Alliance and has recently returned to veterinary diagnostic imaging at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University.

Lisa St George, MSW, CPRP, CPSS brings over 40 years of experience in the health and human services industry. She currently serves as the Vice President of Peer Support and Empowerment at RI International. Her work with RI spans 22 years, during which time she has provided executive leadership and program development of RI International’s peer support workforce and programs in Arizona, California, and New Zealand. She is a principle author of RI International’s Peer Employment Training which has trained over 15,500 peer support workers nationally and internationally. In addition, she has written over 100 training tools, articles, publications, and presentations that have focused on peer support, recovery, inpatient psychiatric care, and crisis services. Most recently she created a fifteen-module training entitled – Crisis Training for Peer Supporters and Other Paraprofessionals (2022). The training was developed in response to the need for trained individuals to join the workforce following implementation of 988 on July 16, 2022. Ms. St George has been recognized by her peers and has received the National Council of Mental Wellness Peer Support of the Year, Mental Health Director’s Program of the Year (San Diego) and California Health Hero (Mental Health Association of CA) as well as the Elton George Armstrong Award.

Publications include, textbook chapters: The Emerging Field of Peer Support within Mental Health Services, within the book – Workforce Development Theory and Practice in the Mental Health Sector, (2017) IGI Publications, and Self-Advocacy and Empowerment, within the Handbook of Recovery in Inpatient Psychiatry (2016), and United States Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association, Workbook for Certification (2003).

Ms St George also serves as a peer reviewer for several professional journals and believes in supporting the growth of knowledge in the field. Ms St George served as a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University and provided the Master’s Level Social Work Course, Mental Illness, Recovery and Social Justice. She has supported the mental health community in Phoenix, AZ by serving as Vice Chair of the Maricopa Human Rights Committee and as a member of the Arizona Behavioral Health Planning Council. Ms St George completed both her Bachelor of Social Work and her Master of Social Work at Arizona State University. She was a board member of International Association of Peer Supporters for fifteen years and sat as Board Chair for three years. As an Advisory Board Member of Open Minds, Lisa supports organizations and systems in the development of peer support and recovery services as well as training and consultation in a variety of areas. Ms St George, has also worked in childhood oncology and child protective services, where she researched and developed a care protocol for crack addicted infants for the State of Arizona Child Protective Services before joining RI International. Lisa also serves vulnerable communities and especially refugees within her community through education, support, and guidance. Ms St George believes in the resiliency of the human spirit, and in the inherent strength of people with trauma, mental health, and addiction challenges.

Niharika Hiremath is a South-Indian mental well-being practitioner and intersectionality advocate living on the lands of the Wurrundjuri people in Melbourne, Australia. A youth mental health advocate by lived experience, a social worker by study and a student of life - she tries to identify and bridge systemic gaps within the wellbeing sector. Niharika focuses on the mental wellbeing of refugee and migrant-background communities through exploring culture and identity, and their overlap with mental health across a number of facets including service delivery, clinical & quality governance and through organsational & systemic change.

Niharika works toward increased sectoral cultural humility by being a member of headspace National Youth Mental Health Foundation's Advisory Board, a member of the Refugee and Migrant Mental Health Partnership led by the former Migration Council of Australia, as well as a number of other committees and working groups. She is an AASW-certified social worker and a Clinician with the South Eastern-Melbourne Primary Health Network (SEMPHN). She also co-chairs Solis - Culture & Mental Health, a capacity-building support network for multicultural mental health advocates and professionals to address silos and promote integration within the sector. Niharika believes in the importance of narrative approaches, as well as the need for agency and self-determination, when working toward a safer and more culturally responsive system.

Lauren Keys is privileged to live and work on Larrakia Country in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. Lauren has been empowered in her healing journey through lived experience advocacy; connection to lived experience and peer communities; and grassroots movements of the NT.

Using ways of knowing, doing and being of lived experience leadership, peer support, education and community development - Lauren focuses on facilitating systems change to support individuals, communities and the lived experience workforce to self-advocate, grow and actualise as agents and experts of personal and collective recovery and healing.

Lauren has a repertoire of experiences in lived experience advocacy and representation, peer support, peer workforce development, consultancy, co-production, community education and skills training. Previously Lauren has worked across the mental health, suicide prevention, disability and community sectors more broadly. Lauren has been juggling her time and resources in both volunteer and paid capacities and some milestones include: Co-designing the first local peer-led recovery education program; developing and delivering the first locally tailored peer work programs in the NT; and membership as a co-founder of the NT Lived Experience Network – the first community group representing the interests and voices of the Lived Experience community in the NT.

Lauren has been a member of numerous national, state, territory and local boards, committees, advisory and working groups; including currently: Consumer Advisory Board of the Flinders University Health and Medical Research Institute, National PHN Mental Health Lived Experience Engagement Network (MHLEEN) and partnership projects between the National Mental Health Consumers and Carers Forum and MHLEEN.

I'm late 2021 Lauren was appointed to the first designated lived experience role at a systems level in the NT and is leading the development and implementation of a Lived Experience Capability Framework with the Northern Territory Primary Network. This systems change initiative is the first significant lived experience reform in the NT and provides a model for developing the lived experience capability of organisations and the sector.

Lauren provides peer support and mentoring to emerging lived experience leaders in the NT and hopes to collaborate with others in the space to create local lived experience leadership development initiatives to grow the community, influence and momentum of the movement.

Juanita Koeijers, BA Health Science, Dip Community Services, AOD Counsellor and Personal Medicine Coach has worked in varied capacities at both state and national levels aspiring to make visible the experience of people who use drugs and their families in the broader health and mental health landscapes. Passionate about courageous conversations, as the primary founder and Chairperson of the first AOD consumer representative body in WA, the AODCCC, she ensured equal inclusion of family members acknowledging the inherently shared experience and the importance of bringing the two together. After writing a peer led submission to a government inquiry bringing the voices of over 80 people who use/have used drugs and their family members to parliament in 2018 the AODCCC was funded to establish, is now recognised as a peak body and charity. Her knowledge base spans across sectors with many years of experience on boards, committees, communities of practice, consultations and forums, developing plans, frameworks, models of service, legislation, and policy, and participating in procurement, recruitment and implementation. Believing strongly in the concept of ‘health through community’ she has worked hard to break barriers between sectors and the stigma of being someone with lived experience of drug use. Always seeking to empower others to be heard, she emphasises the need to be ever strategic in their delivery of their message and vigilant about staying current, informed, and connected so that a consistent, collective voice may be used as leverage to push systemic change and create the inclusive, compassionate cultures we seek to be a part of.

At the 2017 ACMHN Symposium: ‘Joining the Dots’, she delivered a unique keynote to this effect: ‘Life the Universe and, Drugs: An Interesting Situation’. Historically focussed, it highlighted that drug use has, in fact, been around, problematic, and documented, since the 3rd century BCE, over 5000 years ago. Juanita was the first lived experience board member of NDRI, has since worked with multiple institutes, peak bodies and universities on a variety of projects including ECU and Sideffect on the development of GamePlan, a VR intervention for youth, the Methamphetamine Taskforce, assistant to the N-ICE trial, engagement educator with HCC, WAPHA and HEN, engagement and translation support to WAHTN and CCI, with other board positions including PBHRWA, RCWA and WARCA.

She currently works in a research and advisory capacity at the UNSW for a national Tina Trial at NDARC. Outside of the sectors she uses her knowledge to improve her local community writing grant applications for the Geographe Bay Yacht Club where she works and sails as well as her small business N2 Nitro Cold Brew which promotes no alcohol, low sugar drinks and harm reduction at festivals while quietly developing the vision for a strategically unique enterprise called ‘Engagement for Change - Our Shared Humanity’.

Angela Obradovic B.Ed., BSW is a mental health consultant and educator who has held senior practice, executive leadership and workforce development roles in the public mental health field over the past 30 years. She has a longstanding commitment to systemic change, family-focussed practice and lived experience leadership that acknowledges the impact of mental illness on relationships and the interdependent needs of all family members, in particular parents and their dependent children. Angela’s advisory body roles have included membership of the Children of Parents with a Mental Illness National Initiative Reference Group for its entirety (2002-2015). In her role as Chief Social Worker for an adult mental health service in Victoria, Angela led implementation of a number of dedicated parent-child, family-carer focussed and peer support programs, as well as early development of consumer and carer lived experience consultant and peer support workforces.

Across her career, and most recently within the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health (Emerging Minds), she contributed to a number of training resources including the ‘Keeping Families and Children in Mind’, ‘Let’s Talk about Children’, ‘Engaging Parents’ eLearning packages and the adult inpatient ‘Keeping in Touch with Your Children Menu’, and was closely involved in the Australian adaption and RCT evaluation for the Let’s Talk about Children Intervention. She has presented extensively, nationally and internationally, on relationally-oriented mental health practice and has co-authored several publications focused on cross-sectoral approaches and family interventions in adult mental health, including ‘Relational recovery: beyond individualism in the recovery approach’ (2016).

With over 10 years’ experience in the lived experience field, Lydia Trowse has a passion for supporting people with lived experience to bring their voices and wisdom to many varied projects and processes in organisations and systems across Australia. Her work has involved developing organisational frameworks, policies and processes to ensure safe and effective collaboration with people with lived and living experiences. She works closely across a wide variety of projects including collaborative and codesign processes, as well as supporting lived experience voices to be heard in workforce development and advocacy spaces. She is passionate about disrupting business as usual and redistributing power to people with lived experience.

Australia 2022 Fellow Mentors

Martha Barbone received her BS and DVM from Colorado State University. She spent twelve years in the US Air Force before being sidelined by a diagnosis of depression and PTSD. After several years including multiple hospitalizations, medications, and other treatments, she was introduced to peer support. This led to newfound hope and discovery of inner strength. She served as the director of the Certified Peer Specialist (CPS) Training for Massachusetts for four years. Martha has also worked providing peer support in an inpatient locked unit and in a peer-run organization. In addition to CPS training, Martha is a certified Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) facilitator, Alternatives to Suicide Facilitator, Hearing Voices Network facilitator, SAMHSA Recovery to Practice Next Steps facilitator and a Vet-to-Vet group facilitator. Martha serves on the advisory board for the National Center on Advancing Person-Centered Practices and Systems (NCAPPS) and served as a member of the Recovery Advisory Board and the Veterans' Engagement Stakeholder Council for the VA Healthcare and Implementation Research (CHOIR) program. She also facilitates Alternatives to Violence workshops in several state prisons. Currently she is on the training team for the Wildflower Alliance and has recently returned to veterinary diagnostic imaging at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University.

Lisa St George, MSW, CPRP, CPSS brings over 40 years of experience in the health and human services industry. She currently serves as the Vice President of Peer Support and Empowerment at RI International. Her work with RI spans 22 years, during which time she has provided executive leadership and program development of RI International’s peer support workforce and programs in Arizona, California, and New Zealand. She is a principle author of RI International’s Peer Employment Training which has trained over 15,500 peer support workers nationally and internationally. In addition, she has written over 100 training tools, articles, publications, and presentations that have focused on peer support, recovery, inpatient psychiatric care, and crisis services. Most recently she created a fifteen-module training entitled – Crisis Training for Peer Supporters and Other Paraprofessionals (2022). The training was developed in response to the need for trained individuals to join the workforce following implementation of 988 on July 16, 2022. Ms. St George has been recognized by her peers and has received the National Council of Mental Wellness Peer Support of the Year, Mental Health Director’s Program of the Year (San Diego) and California Health Hero (Mental Health Association of CA) as well as the Elton George Armstrong Award.

Publications include, textbook chapters: The Emerging Field of Peer Support within Mental Health Services, within the book – Workforce Development Theory and Practice in the Mental Health Sector, (2017) IGI Publications, and Self-Advocacy and Empowerment, within the Handbook of Recovery in Inpatient Psychiatry (2016), and United States Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association, Workbook for Certification (2003).

Ms St George also serves as a peer reviewer for several professional journals and believes in supporting the growth of knowledge in the field. Ms St George served as a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University and provided the Master’s Level Social Work Course, Mental Illness, Recovery and Social Justice. She has supported the mental health community in Phoenix, AZ by serving as Vice Chair of the Maricopa Human Rights Committee and as a member of the Arizona Behavioral Health Planning Council. Ms St George completed both her Bachelor of Social Work and her Master of Social Work at Arizona State University. She was a board member of International Association of Peer Supporters for fifteen years and sat as Board Chair for three years. As an Advisory Board Member of Open Minds, Lisa supports organizations and systems in the development of peer support and recovery services as well as training and consultation in a variety of areas. Ms St George, has also worked in childhood oncology and child protective services, where she researched and developed a care protocol for crack addicted infants for the State of Arizona Child Protective Services before joining RI International. Lisa also serves vulnerable communities and especially refugees within her community through education, support, and guidance. Ms St George believes in the resiliency of the human spirit, and in the inherent strength of people with trauma, mental health, and addiction challenges.

Niharika Hiremath is a South-Indian mental well-being practitioner and intersectionality advocate living on the lands of the Wurrundjuri people in Melbourne, Australia. A youth mental health advocate by lived experience, a social worker by study and a student of life - she tries to identify and bridge systemic gaps within the wellbeing sector. Niharika focuses on the mental wellbeing of refugee and migrant-background communities through exploring culture and identity, and their overlap with mental health across a number of facets including service delivery, clinical & quality governance and through organsational & systemic change.

Niharika works toward increased sectoral cultural humility by being a member of headspace National Youth Mental Health Foundation's Advisory Board, a member of the Refugee and Migrant Mental Health Partnership led by the former Migration Council of Australia, as well as a number of other committees and working groups. She is an AASW-certified social worker and a Clinician with the South Eastern-Melbourne Primary Health Network (SEMPHN). She also co-chairs Solis - Culture & Mental Health, a capacity-building support network for multicultural mental health advocates and professionals to address silos and promote integration within the sector. Niharika believes in the importance of narrative approaches, as well as the need for agency and self-determination, when working toward a safer and more culturally responsive system.

Lauren Keys is privileged to live and work on Larrakia Country in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. Lauren has been empowered in her healing journey through lived experience advocacy; connection to lived experience and peer communities; and grassroots movements of the NT.

Using ways of knowing, doing and being of lived experience leadership, peer support, education and community development - Lauren focuses on facilitating systems change to support individuals, communities and the lived experience workforce to self-advocate, grow and actualise as agents and experts of personal and collective recovery and healing.

Lauren has a repertoire of experiences in lived experience advocacy and representation, peer support, peer workforce development, consultancy, co-production, community education and skills training. Previously Lauren has worked across the mental health, suicide prevention, disability and community sectors more broadly. Lauren has been juggling her time and resources in both volunteer and paid capacities and some milestones include: Co-designing the first local peer-led recovery education program; developing and delivering the first locally tailored peer work programs in the NT; and membership as a co-founder of the NT Lived Experience Network – the first community group representing the interests and voices of the Lived Experience community in the NT.

Lauren has been a member of numerous national, state, territory and local boards, committees, advisory and working groups; including currently: Consumer Advisory Board of the Flinders University Health and Medical Research Institute, National PHN Mental Health Lived Experience Engagement Network (MHLEEN) and partnership projects between the National Mental Health Consumers and Carers Forum and MHLEEN.

I'm late 2021 Lauren was appointed to the first designated lived experience role at a systems level in the NT and is leading the development and implementation of a Lived Experience Capability Framework with the Northern Territory Primary Network. This systems change initiative is the first significant lived experience reform in the NT and provides a model for developing the lived experience capability of organisations and the sector.

Lauren provides peer support and mentoring to emerging lived experience leaders in the NT and hopes to collaborate with others in the space to create local lived experience leadership development initiatives to grow the community, influence and momentum of the movement.

Juanita Koeijers, BA Health Science, Dip Community Services, AOD Counsellor and Personal Medicine Coach has worked in varied capacities at both state and national levels aspiring to make visible the experience of people who use drugs and their families in the broader health and mental health landscapes. Passionate about courageous conversations, as the primary founder and Chairperson of the first AOD consumer representative body in WA, the AODCCC, she ensured equal inclusion of family members acknowledging the inherently shared experience and the importance of bringing the two together. After writing a peer led submission to a government inquiry bringing the voices of over 80 people who use/have used drugs and their family members to parliament in 2018 the AODCCC was funded to establish, is now recognised as a peak body and charity. Her knowledge base spans across sectors with many years of experience on boards, committees, communities of practice, consultations and forums, developing plans, frameworks, models of service, legislation, and policy, and participating in procurement, recruitment and implementation. Believing strongly in the concept of ‘health through community’ she has worked hard to break barriers between sectors and the stigma of being someone with lived experience of drug use. Always seeking to empower others to be heard, she emphasises the need to be ever strategic in their delivery of their message and vigilant about staying current, informed, and connected so that a consistent, collective voice may be used as leverage to push systemic change and create the inclusive, compassionate cultures we seek to be a part of.

At the 2017 ACMHN Symposium: ‘Joining the Dots’, she delivered a unique keynote to this effect: ‘Life the Universe and, Drugs: An Interesting Situation’. Historically focussed, it highlighted that drug use has, in fact, been around, problematic, and documented, since the 3rd century BCE, over 5000 years ago. Juanita was the first lived experience board member of NDRI, has since worked with multiple institutes, peak bodies and universities on a variety of projects including ECU and Sideffect on the development of GamePlan, a VR intervention for youth, the Methamphetamine Taskforce, assistant to the N-ICE trial, engagement educator with HCC, WAPHA and HEN, engagement and translation support to WAHTN and CCI, with other board positions including PBHRWA, RCWA and WARCA.

She currently works in a research and advisory capacity at the UNSW for a national Tina Trial at NDARC. Outside of the sectors she uses her knowledge to improve her local community writing grant applications for the Geographe Bay Yacht Club where she works and sails as well as her small business N2 Nitro Cold Brew which promotes no alcohol, low sugar drinks and harm reduction at festivals while quietly developing the vision for a strategically unique enterprise called ‘Engagement for Change - Our Shared Humanity’.

Angela Obradovic B.Ed., BSW is a mental health consultant and educator who has held senior practice, executive leadership and workforce development roles in the public mental health field over the past 30 years. She has a longstanding commitment to systemic change, family-focussed practice and lived experience leadership that acknowledges the impact of mental illness on relationships and the interdependent needs of all family members, in particular parents and their dependent children. Angela’s advisory body roles have included membership of the Children of Parents with a Mental Illness National Initiative Reference Group for its entirety (2002-2015). In her role as Chief Social Worker for an adult mental health service in Victoria, Angela led implementation of a number of dedicated parent-child, family-carer focussed and peer support programs, as well as early development of consumer and carer lived experience consultant and peer support workforces.

Across her career, and most recently within the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health (Emerging Minds), she contributed to a number of training resources including the ‘Keeping Families and Children in Mind’, ‘Let’s Talk about Children’, ‘Engaging Parents’ eLearning packages and the adult inpatient ‘Keeping in Touch with Your Children Menu’, and was closely involved in the Australian adaption and RCT evaluation for the Let’s Talk about Children Intervention. She has presented extensively, nationally and internationally, on relationally-oriented mental health practice and has co-authored several publications focused on cross-sectoral approaches and family interventions in adult mental health, including ‘Relational recovery: beyond individualism in the recovery approach’ (2016).

With over 10 years’ experience in the lived experience field, Lydia Trowse has a passion for supporting people with lived experience to bring their voices and wisdom to many varied projects and processes in organisations and systems across Australia. Her work has involved developing organisational frameworks, policies and processes to ensure safe and effective collaboration with people with lived and living experiences. She works closely across a wide variety of projects including collaborative and codesign processes, as well as supporting lived experience voices to be heard in workforce development and advocacy spaces. She is passionate about disrupting business as usual and redistributing power to people with lived experience.