Mahesh Prajapat is the Owner and Director of Onwards Consulting
A clinician and former executive with more than 30 years of experience working with children, teens, and parents. Mahesh provides a range of services for families experiencing divorce and separation including section 30 assessments, voice of the child reports, counselling, mediation, parent coordination and supervised parenting time.
Mahesh has dedicated his career to helping ensure families remain strong and connected and children remain safe, regardless of their situation. Ensuring the emotional and physical safety of children is always paramount in all the work Mahesh engages in, he considers his responsibility to the safety of children as his highest priority.
Mahesh is the former COO of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, and in that role led the transformation to a service model which focused on prevention by strengthening family capacity, ensuring children were able to stay at home and in their communities and fighting hard to undo the numerous oppressive practices that is the legacy of Child Welfare.
Mahesh has been deemed an expert witness by the Courts in Ontario, Canada on child development, parent-child relations and custody and access recommendations. He has also been deemed an expert in numerous child welfare trials. The opinions and testimony that Mahesh has provided has helped resolve numerous child custody and access matters and child welfare proceedings.
Mahesh understands that issues of diversity, equity and inclusion intersect with every case that involves children and families and it is critical to approach all our work with an anti-oppression lens, to ensure that bias is addressed and to ensure that all people have the same advantage regardless of their identity.
Mahesh is committed to creating working relationships in which every child, youth and family feels respected and included. He does this by promoting honest conversations, diverse collaborations, and by paying special attention to work with marginalized groups and persons.
Mahesh acknowledges that there are obstacles to this work as many systems, including the legal system, have a history of racism and oppression that must be acknowledged, understood and efforts made for improvement. Mahesh believes that we can collectively improve our work and advance the principles of anti-oppressive clinical practice by acknowledging that racism and bias exists in our many systems, not by ignoring it.