Rachael Burns (she/her) is an intersectional Lived Experience advocate working across mental health, disability and youth spaces.
Rachael spent her childhood, adolescence and early adulthood navigating overlapping mental health challenges. Her interactions within public, private, voluntary and involuntary mental health services shaped her view of the systems built to support people and what still gets missed within them.
Out of that experience, she founded Integrity Initiative, growing it from an idea to deliver care packages to a local hospital into a registered charity working to embed human rights, autonomy and dignity into mental health conversations and care.
As a grassroots Founder and now Chief Executive Officer, Rachael has turned that idea into a registered not-for-profit and a thriving community, navigating barriers and epistemic injustice along the way. That journey gives her a firsthand understanding of what it actually takes to build something lasting from lived experience.
Beyond Integrity Initiative, she sits on several advisory groups and committees, contributes to research, writes and speaks in the media, and carries out systemic advocacy alongside her public speaking work.
With curiosity, honesty and enviable determination, Rachael reminds audiences that systems change when the people inside them are trusted to lead, and that professionalism, expertise and authenticity can sit in the same room without one cancelling out the other.