This supervisor has been approved to provide supervision under the ACCESS TO SUPERVISION PROJECT.

Hello! I’m Ali Noura, a family/carer lived experience worker with over six years of experience spanning peer support, policy, and consulting.

Growing up in a Lebanese Muslim migrant-refugee family, I was a young carer for many loved ones facing mental health challenges, often compounded by stigma and cultural taboos. This personal journey is what led me into advocacy, supporting young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds to access culturally safe mental health care. During COVID-19, I formally joined the lived experience workforce as a peer worker supporting families, carers and supporters navigating the public mental health system at the peak of the pandemic. Since then, I’ve focused on system reform, helping embed lived experience into policy and service design.

As someone from a migrant-refugee background who speaks English, Arabic and Bahasa Indonesia, what motivates me is a deep calling to help people connect, realise their potential and build communities where they and others can thrive. I’m especially passionate about supporting emerging leaders from diverse cultural, faith and language backgrounds to craft and develop their own unique lived experience practice.

If you’re an emerging lived experience practitioner looking to grow your practice, especially in system reform, please reach out. I look forward to connecting.

This supervisor has been approved to provide supervision under the ACCESS TO SUPERVISION PROJECT. If you are a supervisee who has received an approval email/letter from the CMHL you may contact this supervisor for supervision for this project, then follow the stated processes for supervision payment.

Designated Family/Carer Roles: • 2020–2021: Family/Carer Peer Support Worker, Royal Melbourne Hospital – supported families, carers and supporters of consumers at the Preston PARC service.

• 2021: Family/Carer Workforce Project Lead, Centre for Mental Health Learning –led workforce development initiatives to strengthen the family/carer lived experience workforce across Victoria’s public mental health services.
• 2022–2023: Carer Advisor, Royal Melbourne Hospital – advised on service improvement activities from a family/carer lived experience lens and supported training and development of family/carer lived experience workers across the service.
• 2024–Current: Co-founder & Director, Lively Collective – leading consulting projects focused on embedding lived expertise into system reform, service design and workforce development.

Additional Relevant Roles: • 2018–2020: Youth Advisor, Centre for Multicultural Youth - advocated for culturally responsive mental health supports for youth from migrant-refugee communities.

• 2018–2021: Embrace Multicultural Mental Health Consumer & Carer Group, Mental Health Australia – provided national-level advice on improving mental health services for multicultural and multifaith communities.
• 2020-2021: Co-founder, Bridging Us – led a co-design consultancy supporting local governments and NGOs to better engage young people in strategic decision-making.
• 2021–2022: Associate Consultant, Impact Co. - delivered consulting projects in the health and social services sector, with a focus on service design and lived experience community engagement.

I’m currently Co-founder and Director of Lively Collective, a lived experience consulting firm. We partner with governments, health services, and community organisations to embed lived experience into system reform. Recent projects include:

• Co-designing the Distress Brief Support pilot program for consumers and families, carers, and supporters in the City of Darebin (Royal Commission Recommendation 27)
• Evaluating the design and early impact of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Connect Centres (Recommendation 31)

While much of my learning has come through direct experience working with consumers and families, carers and supporters, I’ve also completed formal training in: • Intentional Peer Support (IPS) • Program Design & Evaluation • Data Analytics & Visualisation • University-level Arabic & Bahasa Indonesia

I continue to learn from the communities I work with every day to actively improve and grow my own practice.

My supervision approach is built on three principles: non-judgemental, person-centred, and co-learning.

• Non-judgemental means I focus on creating a space where supervisees feel safe to bring their full selves — theirs strengths, fears, and questions — without shame. This is critically for allowing people to bring their full selves and tackle their deepest challenges and aspirations.
• Person-centred: My approach is tailored and led by the supervisee’s goals and interests. Rather than pushing my own ideas, I support supervisors to discuss their goals and define their own path, not follow my path or someone else’s.
• Co-learning: I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t pretend to. I learn from supervisees just as they learn from me. I believe this humility and mutual respect is at the heart of building a supervision relationship where both people can truly push each other's thinking and growth.

Additionally, I also bring an intersectional lens to supervision, helping supervisees explore how their own diverse and intersectional lived experiences — across culture, faith, language, and identity — shape their practice and how they can use these experiences to support others from similar communities and backgrounds.