AASW Social Worker of the Year 2025

When you meet Michael Elwan, what stands out first is not the long list of accolades attached to his name, but the quiet conviction beneath them. In 2025, he was named AASW Social Worker of the Year, a recognition that reflects both national impact and a deeply personal journey. As Michael puts it, “I didn’t plan to become a social worker; I became one through survival and love.”

Michael grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, where at fourteen he became his father’s carer after a stroke left him blind. When his mother later died by suicide following years of unsupported mental illness, he made a promise to himself that no one should ever feel unseen in their suffering. Years later, after migrating to Australia alone in his twenties, rebuilding his life through study, community, and purpose, that promise eventually found its home in social work.

He earned postgraduate qualifications in social work, mental health, leadership, and psychology, eventually leading major community programs across Western Australia. Over time, he noticed a systemic gap that echoed his own lived experience: multicultural communities were often invisible in mainstream mental health systems, and the social workers serving them were carrying extraordinary emotional and cultural labour, often without acknowledgment or structural support. This realisation became the foundation for Lived Experience Solutions (LEXs), the independent practice he founded to strengthen multicultural mental health through lived experience leadership. The guiding principle of the work is simple but profound: “Systems should hold, not harm.”

Through LEXs, Michael provides online therapy, reflective supervision, training, and consultancy nationwide. The independence of this work allows him to blend research, lived experience, and humanity in a way that feels deeply authentic. His PhD research explores how organisations can better support lived experience leadership, an inquiry grounded in what he sees every day: sustainable change depends on how well systems care for the people within them.

Much of Michael’s practice has centred around reflective supervision, a space he describes as a quiet form of social justice. He was drawn to it after supporting practitioners—often from multicultural backgrounds—who were burning out under layers of cultural translation, invisible labour, racism, tokenism, and the pressure of representing entire communities. For him, supervision became a way to “hold the holders,” a space where social workers could explore belonging, identity, ethics, and the emotional complexity of the work. He recalls one supervisee who told him that reflective supervision had kept them in the profession at a moment when they were ready to leave. Months later, that same worker was leading a regional wellbeing initiative for multicultural practitioners. Witnessing them not just stay, but rise, continues to affirm the purpose of his work.

Michael’s impact extends beyond individual practitioners. He contributes to state and national advisory groups shaping suicide prevention and multicultural mental health policy, ensuring that lived experience and cultural insight inform every level of decision-making. He sees loneliness and cultural disconnection as the threads running through much of the distress he encounters—from newly arrived families to practitioners stretched thin within the system. For him, the sustainability of the workforce is one of the profession’s most urgent concerns. Reflective supervision, workforce wellbeing, and cultural humility, he says, are not luxuries but structural necessities: the scaffolding of social justice.

In the coming year, Michael will lead two national AASW professional development sessions, one exploring the mental health of men from CaLD backgrounds, and another supporting culturally responsive supervision for CaLD practitioners. Both sessions sit firmly within his mission: strengthening the profession by strengthening the people who hold it up.

Michael’s own practice is deeply shaped by his cultural roots. Migration taught him humility, he says, and his Egyptian heritage taught him that healing is collective, built through community, storytelling, and shared humanity. These teachings echo quietly through every interaction. His advice to social workers entering this field reflects that blend of insight and compassion: begin with curiosity rather than certainty; seek supervision that challenges gently and holds firmly; remember that culture shapes everything in practice; and protect your wellbeing as an ethical responsibility, not an afterthought.

Outside of work, Michael is a husband and father of two. Family is his grounding force, the daily reminder that love is the first form of care. He writes to make sense of the world, travels to stay curious, and finds stillness by the ocean. Quiet mornings, he says, restore him. They offer the calm from which he continues the work of holding space for others.

Looking ahead, Michael hopes to see greater investment in supervision, workforce wellbeing, and cultural safety across the sector. He believes the future of social work depends on how deeply systems honour the people working within them. As he reflects on the profession’s evolution, he returns to a truth shaped by lived experience: “Supervision, done well, is a quiet form of social justice.” And through his leadership, practice, and presence, he continues to embody that ethic, steadily transforming not only the systems he works within, but the people who move through them.