ermha365’s Lived and Living Experience Advisory Committee (LLEAC) is co-chaired between a Board Director with a disability and an external LLE co-chair.
The LLEAC engages a wide range of people with disability, mental ill-health, neurodivergent people, as well as capturing representation across intersecting identities reflecting the diverse communities we support.
Melanie Sherrin, LLEAC Co-Chair
she/her
Mel Sherrin is a governance and legal professional and lived experience advocate committed to strengthening the voice and influence of consumers across the mental health system. She brings both professional expertise and her own lived experience of mental ill-health, and is a current user of mental health services. This gives her a personal understanding of the importance of safety, dignity, and being genuinely heard in care.
Mel has also listened to and learned from many consumer experiences through her involvement in research and advocacy initiatives focused on improving rights, access to advocacy, and legal protections for people experiencing mental distress. She is General Counsel and Company Secretary at the Australian Physiotherapy Association and Secretary of the Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council (VMIAC).
As Co-Chair of ermha365’s Lived and Living Experience Advisory Committee, Mel is passionate about ensuring lived experience is meaningfully embedded in how services are designed, governed, and improved.
Carol Heijo, LLEAC Co-Chair
they/them, Gender Agnostic
Carol was born in Uruguay, is blind since birth and identifies as non-binary and Queer. Carol is a Human Resources professional with over 30 years of leadership experience in the public and private sectors.
Carol specialises in Workforce Strategy, Policy Development and Access and Inclusion. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, a Diploma of Business in frontline Management, an Associate Diploma in Community Welfare and a Certificate of Marketing.
Carol was awarded the Australia Day Achievement Award for exceptional commitment and dedication to providing information and advice on workplace participation and inclusion for people with disability.
Emily Unity
Emily Unity is an intersectional lived and living experience advocate. They are passionate about creating change through disrupting traditional systems and amplifying intersectional voices. Emily is informed by their intersectional lived and living experiences. This includes mental ill-health, disability, LGBTQIA+, multiculturalism, neurodivergence, homelessness, family violence, and more. For their work, Emily was recently awarded 25 Under 25, 30 Under 30, Mental Health Advocate of the Year, Youth of the Year, the Disability Leadership Award, Innovation in Protecting Children Award, Children and Youth Empowerment Award, and inducted in the inaugural cohort of the Multicultural Honor Roll.
Ruth Clare
Ruth Clare is a TEDx and keynote speaker, thought leader, child voice and mental health activist, qualified scientist, communication consultant, coach and award-winning author of ENEMY, a memoir about her experience as the child of a veteran, growing up in a home with family violence and addiction.
Ruth transforms science, storytelling and hard-won personal insights learned during her own trauma recovery journey into practical tools and strategies for healing and growth. She has delivered a grand round at Melbourne’s Royal Children Hospital, and been keynote speaker at many mental health, veteran, domestic violence, child welfare, school and government events. Her TEDx talk The Pain of Hiding Your True Self has had over half a million views. A regular podcast, radio guest and media contributor, Ruth has also shared the wisdom of her lived experience at social support and domestic violence services, psychological associations, universities, government and veteran organisations.
Zoe Simmons
she/they
Storyteller. Content creator. Changemaker. Zoe Simmons is an award-winning journalist, speaker, author and fierce disability advocate who uses the raw power of storytelling and lived experience to smash stigma and create change. She’s been published hundreds of times around the globe, and candidly shares her experience as a chronically ill, multiply disabled, autistic LGBTQIA+ person.
Passionate about accessibility, lived experience and genuine diversity and inclusion, Zoe also works as an advisor for a number of health, disability, research and media organisations, including having made history as the first disabled person on the ABC’s Youth Advisory Committee. Currently, she’s working with Women With Disabilities Victoria on projects to improve experiences for LGBTQIA+ people with disabilities as a lived experience advisor, working in communications for Disability Rights and Culture, and a casual academic with La Trobe University for a project on improving sexual safety for neurodivergent LGBTQIA+ people. She’s also an ambassador with the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Equality At Work project.
Zoe also regularly advocates in the media, including online, radio, and TV, most recently in the form of co-hosting her first show, All In, which won Best New Program at the 2025 Antenna Awards, as well as co-hosting C31’s show Laneway: a CTV News Project, and being a guest reporter for award-winning show AbiliTV.
Rocket Bretherton
she/her
Rocket Bretherton is a proud Noongar woman and has many years’ experience as a campaigner and advocate.
She also has deep subject matter expertise as a consequence of her own experience in the NT justice system and living with her own mental health conditions.
Rocket has been working since 2019 to raise public awareness of the failings of the justice and mental health systems and is an expert advisor on a range of panels, advisory groups and projects related to justice, mental health and disability.
Rocket lives and works on unceded Larrakia land.
Abuzar Mazoori
Abuzar Mazoori is a community leader, human rights activist and trauma informed community capacity building practitioner grown up in a war-torn country with past traumatic experiences as the most persecuted ethnic minority in Afghanistan and a survivor of a suicide bombing.
Abuzar came to Australia as a refugee at his mid-twenties in late 2015. His educational background stretches from a Law degree graduate from Afghanistan to a Certificate IV in Justice, Diploma of Interpreting and International Relations degree in Australia.
Abuzar transformed his lived hardships and struggles as a survivor and refugee into practical tools and strategies for not only personal strength, empowerment and resilience but for community empowerment and collective resilience.
Raquel Taylor
she/her
Raquel is a mother to a special needs son and also mental health/DV warrior/survivor. She is passionate about advocacy in the disability/mental health space and have been with ermha365 for the last 13 years in various capacities.
Raquel started as an ermha365 consumer/client and with her recruitment background came onboard to conduct staff interviews. She was then asked to be a member of our first Consumer Stakeholder Committee which she Co-Chaired for nearly 10 years. Raquel loved being a part of new developments and programs and putting peoples’ ideas forward.
Raquel jumped at the chance to be on the new Committee – to be able to push forward the initiatives and thoughts of the company to those that can make a change for others, and be a voice for those that want to speak.