Lived Impact is a non-clinical peer support and education resource. It does not replace medical, psychological or emergency care.
Meet the Founder
Hayley Brown
Strategist. Advocate. Systems thinker. Founder of Lived Impact.
Hayley Brown founded Lived Impact from a conviction that the human services sector was sitting on an untapped strategic resource - and consistently failing to use it well.
With a background spanning direct service, policy, and organisational leadership, Hayley has spent over a decade working at the intersection of lived experience and systems change. We have advised government agencies, peak bodies, and community organisations across Australia on how to move beyond tokenistic consultation toward genuine co-design and structural reform.
Her work is grounded in a simple but radical premise: people who have navigated complex systems carry a form of expertise that is irreplaceable. Organisations that learn to access it make better decisions, design better services, and build more durable change.
Hayley is a sought-after speaker, facilitator, and strategic advisor. We bring the analytical rigour of a policy professional and the moral clarity of someone who has seen, up close, what happens when systems get it wrong.
Expertise
- ·Lived experience governance & co-design
- ·Workforce development & peer practice
- ·Policy reform & systems advocacy
- ·Organisational culture change
- ·Strategic facilitation & consultation
Sectors
- ·Mental health & psychosocial disability
- ·Housing & homelessness
- ·Child protection & family services
- ·Alcohol & other drugs
- ·Criminal justice
- ·Domestic, family & sexual violence
- ·Public health
Qualifications
- -Bachelor of Management (Marketing)University of South Australia
- -Cert IV Mental Health Peer WorkCentacare
- -Outcomes MeasurementCentre for Social Impact
- -Executive Lived Experience LeadershipLived Experience Training
"I started Lived Impact because I kept seeing the same pattern: organisations bringing in people with lived experience to validate decisions that had already been made. That's not co-design. That's performance."
Hayley Brown, Founder
What Drives the Work
Core Values
Ethical Embedding
Lived experience involvement must be structured, compensated, and protected - not extracted. We build frameworks that make ethical practice the default, not the exception.
Accountability
Systems change requires honest measurement. We hold organisations to account for the gap between their stated commitments and their actual practice - with rigour and without apology.
Human-Centred Design
Every system, policy, and process should be designed around the people it serves - not the other way around. This principle shapes everything we build and advise.
Work With Us
Whether you need strategic advice, a skilled facilitator, or a keynote speaker who can shift the room - let's talk.
Get in Touch