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Consulting
Work that moves
across disciplines.
Beyond the therapy room, Lex brings a licensed clinical framework, curriculum expertise, and a social justice lens to institutional design, wellness programming, and systems that touch the lives of people navigating complex environments.
30+
Years combined experience
6
Institutions served
25,000+
Students reached
4
Workshops at Cornell Health
Selected projects
The Work
Each engagement begins with listening. Site visits, stakeholder interviews, and a genuine discovery process before a single recommendation is made.
Higher education
Curriculum
Wellness
Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Personal Empowerment Program
​Rebuilding a wellness program from the inside out
HWS reached out to two alumnae with long careers in mental health to redesign a program that hadn't been formally revised in five years and had never had a Facilitator Manual. The engagement began with a site visit and structured interviews with students, facilitators, faculty, and the program's original founders — who remained active and were treated as collaborators, not artifacts. The result was a complete 12-week curriculum integrating CBT, DBT, MBSR, Polyvagal Theory, ACT, and a social justice framework that addressed identity and oppression cycles directly within the clinical model.
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HWS Institutional Research measured outcomes using validated instruments (CCAPS and RYFF) across 100+ students — consistent improvements in depression, anxiety, personal growth, and self-acceptance.
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First-ever Facilitator Manual produced — enabling consistent delivery across multiple instructors without session-by-session clinical supervision.
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Collaborating consultant: Jenna Berman, LCSW
Higher education
Digital health
Clinical content
Cornell University
Cornell Health / CAPS
Digital Workshop Program
Four workshops. One clinician. 25,000 students.
The digital mental health workshop program at Cornell Health had languished for two years without producing a single deployed workshop. Lex proposed taking it over, taught himself the production tools (Panopto, Canvas), scripted every word of every module, designed all slide materials, recorded all video content, and launched the full program in summer 2025. Four of the six workshops currently live at Cornell Health were authored and produced entirely by Lex — with no dedicated budget, no instructional design department, and no vendor.
Everyday Resilience
10 modules · 62 minutes · CBT, Polyvagal Theory
Resilience as a learnable skill. Stress physiology, nervous system regulation, and evidence-based strategies for sustained student life.
Meditation 101
9 modules · video, written & audio · MBSR
Science-informed, story-forward introduction to meditation for students who have tried and stopped — or assumed they couldn't do it.
Unraveling Anxiety
10 modules · CBT, DBT, ACT, somatic awareness
Anxiety across thought, body, sleep, and relationship — with clinical frameworks and practical tools for students who recognize anxiety in themselves.
Thesis Therapy
8 modules · ACT, CBT, narrative therapy
The emotional and psychological barriers of long-form academic writing: perfectionism, procrastination, burnout, and the weight of the work.
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All four workshops remain live at Cornell Health and in active student use as of 2026.
International ed
Systems design
Safety infrastructure
Major research university
Travel Safety & International Registry
Building the infrastructure that tells you where your people are
As Coordinator of Travel Safety at an Ivy League research university, Lex was charged with building the institution's first university-wide international travel registry — across every college, department, and travel channel, in an institution where no centralized process had ever existed. The work began not with technology but with mapping: interviewing staff across colleges, consulting peer institutions including Michigan, Penn, and Northwestern, and producing a comprehensive analysis of why most university travel registries fail. The framework that emerged — know your landscape, migrate programs, build simply, mandate from the top — is the reason the systems that work actually work.
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Migrated the university's entire international program portfolio into a single platform across all colleges — faculty-led programs, service learning, graduate research travel, student organizations.
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Produced a comparative analysis of travel safety infrastructure at 20+ peer institutions, benchmarking staffing, structure, and student reach.
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Also partnered with Terra Dotta to redesign their platform workflow — collapsing a fragmented, multi-screen experience into a coherent single-entry system.
Intellectual foundation
Thirty years
of one idea.
In 1996, as a sophomore at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Lex took a course called Making Connections — a peer-facilitated curriculum built on a single premise: there is no hierarchy of oppression. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, anti-Semitism, ageism — none is more urgent or more real than another. They are interwoven systems. If one exists, they all exist.
The course didn't just introduce a framework. It introduced a way of seeing that didn't go away.
Lex trained as a facilitator during his junior year and trained the trainers in his senior year. He has carried the methodology — its affinity groups, its speak-outs, its insistence on witnessing over debate — into thirty years of clinical practice and institutional consulting. It is present in every curriculum he redesigns, every training he leads, and every therapeutic encounter he holds.
Why this matters for consulting clients
When A Key Therapy consults with a university wellness program, a DEI initiative, or a staff training series, this is the lens behind the work. Not as ideology — as methodology.
The Cycle of Personal Oppression
The model at the center of Making Connections maps how individuals absorb institutional messages from birth, internalize them as identity, and reproduce them as behavior. Understanding that cycle is what makes a curriculum redesign more than a content update.
Social justice bibliography
Freire · hooks · Crenshaw · Lorde · Tatum · Alexander
Clinical frameworks
CBT · DBT · MBSR · Polyvagal Theory · ACT · AMI (Acceptance and Motivation Inquiry)
Clinical bibliography
Linehan · Kabat-Zinn · Porges · Dweck · Beck · Hayes
Licensure
New York · Delaware · Virginia · New Jersey (pending)
Making Connections:
The Course That Changed My Life
A book bringing the Making Connections framework to a broader audience — not as a syllabus, but as a living invitation to understand oppression as a system that can be studied, interrupted, and ultimately dismantled.
White paper
One Clinician, Four Workshops, 25,000 Students
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