Meet the MPP Family

I'm a Queer Lebanese Muslim Peer Counsellour and the Project Lead at MPP. I’ve been privileged to work in mental health with NSW Health for over 7 years, across 30+ teams in more than 7 hospitals and community centres, focusing on lived experience work and creative therapies. I’m specialised in child and adolescent mental health, forensic mental health, drug and alcohol rehabilitation and suicide prevention. I feel blessed to bring everything I’ve learned in these spaces to MPP, supporting young people from our communities to find softness, hope, abundance and to live their most authentic lives.

I believe firmly in Peer Counselling and the recovery model, which highlights the ongoing nature of recovery, the need for safety/trust alongside agency and choice, as well as the importance of being trauma-informed in all the work we do. In our sessions, we shine a special focus on cultural lived experience, knowing how being understood as QTBIPOC is a core need for many of us to feel seen and engage with our internal worlds through counselling. We incorporate elements of CBT, DBT, ACT and Narrative Therapy principles in all our sessions, with a focus on mental health and cultural lived experience guiding us throughout.

At the Forensic Hospital, I developed a 12 week poetry therapy program called Recovery Poetry and ran music therapy programs with young people, with elements of art therapy incorporated in the work we do in individual sessions as well. As a mental health advocate, I've contributed to legislation to ban conversion therapy, conducted lectures at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University on lived experience practice and models of care and continuing working with Legal Aid to provide mental health training to legal practitioners across Australia.
Outside of the mental health sector, I'm also a Writer/Director/Poet/Playwright/Musician and involuntary artist who’s running out of ways to express themselves. I advocate strongly for people or be able to concurrently exist as both working professionals and artists, knowing how interlinked wellbeing and the arts can be for so many of us.

When we grow up as QTBIPOC, we can feel really isolated and misunderstood - even both by those who love us. I hope to create a space where you feel safe, seen and understood. Where we can make sense of your internal world, promote safety and agency in your external world and connect you with more incredible QTBIPOC icons. I hope we can give you the tools and language to speak for yourself and tell your own story. If this sounds like what you need right now, I look forward to working with you soon- inshallah.

I'll be bringing my lived experience of mental health recovery into my practice along with my mixed cultural and mixed-faith background.I'm a registered counsellor who's worked in the disability, education, and drug and alcohol recovery spaces. I'm a passionate ally for the LGBTIQ+ community, having worked closely with South Asian and Muslim queer spaces over the years. My therapist toolbox contains a range of modalities, including narrative therapy, art therapy, psychodynamic therapy, and acceptance commitment therapy. Importantly, my practice is trauma-informed and I’m always learning new and effective ways to hold space for pain and make room for healing. When I don't have my 'counsellor' hat on, I'm usually sketching, dancing (badly) to pop music, or being held hostage by a sleepy lap cat named John.

I'm excited to foster deep community connections amongst our peers & fellow kin, setting up a foreground for our future generations to run freely. Through curating events, workshops & this digital realm, my role at MPP will be bringing us together. My background in volunteering as Digital Producer & Community Engagement for Race Matters on fbi. radio & studying Communications majoring in Media Arts & Production / Social & Political Science will inform my practice. I proudly identify as a queer Muslim & was born in Syria (I can speak Arabic relatively okay!). I love to dress up & dance with friends, play games, take photos, hang with my cats, Brick & Bilal.