Founder, Co-Creator
Elizabeth Morrison
PhD, LCSW, MAC.
Founder of The Lay Counselor Academy. Practicing clinical social worker for over twenty-five years across California public health, community mental health, and private practice. Master Addiction Counselor. PhD in social psychology.
A practitioner who teaches.
Elizabeth started in California's public mental health system more than two decades ago, working with the people most underserved by conventional care: the unhoused, people in active addiction, people who had given up on systems that had given up on them. The work shaped how she thinks about counseling, and what she thinks counseling is for.
Over the years she trained clinicians, ran teams, consulted with county agencies, and kept seeing the same gap: the licensed clinical workforce could not meet community need, and the people most likely to be in the room when someone was hurting were rarely clinicians. The Lay Counselor Academy is her answer to that gap.
What she teaches.
Elizabeth teaches across the seven modules of the academy. Her strongest classroom voice is on the foundations: how to sit with someone, how to notice your own biases without flinching, how to counter the urge to fix, how to recognize when counseling is on fertile ground.
She has been featured in STAT News, the Modesto Bee, and the California Health Care Foundation's external evaluation of the academy. The Steinberg Institute named her and Alli Moreno their 2023 Champions for this work.
Beyond the academy.
Elizabeth is the founder of Elizabeth Morrison Consulting, a California-based practice and consultancy. She also runs Flourish, a counseling service for working adults. She still sees clients.
Read the sample lesson Elizabeth teaches.
Listening without fixing is Lesson 1 of the academy. She wrote it.