An episode of Changing the Conversation podcast
Johanna Bergan and Gina Albano discuss the history and current status of youth peer support with host Rowan Willis-Gorman. This episode is part of a series featuring youth peer workers and recovery innovators discussing how to improve and uplift behavioral health systems for youth.
November 3, 2025
[Music]
Rowan Willis-Gorman, Host (00:05): Hello and welcome to Changing the Conversation. I’m your host, Rowan Willis-Gorman. I’m a subject matter expert and manager at C4 Innovations within our Centre for Youth Well-Being. Today’s conversation is part of a podcast series called The Next Generation of Recovery Leaders where together we’ll learn from youth peer workers and recovery innovators about how they’re utilizing creativity, grassroots organizing, and determination to uplift a behavioral health system for them. Through conversation and reflective storytelling, we’ll explore the current landscape of youth and young adult recovery systems across the country, discuss how innovative youth voices have impacted those systems and how harmful legislation is being met with passionate young advocates pushing towards a brighter future. Our aim is to uplift and recognize the vibrant youth leaders across the country and to inspire the next generation of advocates. Today I have two guests with me, Gina Albano and Johanna Bergen. Gina is calling in today from Haverhill, Massachusetts and she’s a lead youth wellness coach at C4 Innovations. Hi, Gina.
Gina Albano, Guest (01:15): Hi, Rowan. Thanks for having me. I’m so happy to be here.
Rowan (01:19): Johanna is calling in from Connecticut where she is a program manager at the Innovations Institute at the University of Connecticut. Hi, Johanna, it’s wonderful to have you with us.
Johanna Bergen, Guest (01:29): Thanks, Rowan. It’s an honor to be here today. Excited to talk to you.
Rowan (01:33): Amazing. It’s so awesome to have you two join us today. This is a conversation that I’ve been so excited to have. As we discussed in our last episode, a natural part of youth peer work is the concept of generation next, and that concept has been instilled in each generation of youth peer workers. So today let’s explore where all this began and where it is now. Gina, what is a youth wellness coach?
Gina (01:59): A youth wellness coach is a non-clinical person. I personally work in a school setting. I’m a near-aged mentor, that’s how I like to define it, that focuses on behavioral health and wellness support for students for a variety of issues that they may be dealing with or struggling with throughout their time in high school.
Rowan (02:24): That sounds amazing, Gina. And if folks haven’t heard, we do an episode with some other Youth Wellness Coaches, Ash and Natalia, where you can learn all about the work that they’re doing in schools. Gina, with your engagement with students, what do you think works really well for you and helps to get them keep coming back to you?
Gina (02:47): I think a big part of the role of a Youth Wellness Coach is lived experience and so being able to relate to students not only on sort of an age level, but also having my own lived experience, being able to be from the community that these students are from creates a really welcoming environment. I think the biggest thing that I’ve noticed is sort of having a non-judgmental approach to these conversations with students is really what keeps them engaged in the work that I’m doing and allows them to keep coming back and meeting with me.
(03:38):
I think my favorite example of these interactions with students that I have that makes me feel like this is working is when students come back to me on their own, without being pulled out of class and seek me out because they’re scared to walk into class or are having a bad day. And so instead of walking around the school or hanging out in a school bathroom, they seek me out as a trusted adult, someone who’s not going to judge them for not wanting to go to class, someone who’s not going to tell them to just get back to class, someone who really understands the difficulties that they may be going through. And so I think that’s what makes sense as far as the Youth Wellness Coach model and the work that I’m doing.
Johanna (04:28): It is so fun to hear you explain what’s working for you as you work with young people, Gina. And particularly because I was a part of the youth movement and amplifying youth voice many years ago and our work was so grounded in individual young people finding their voice, becoming their own self-advocate, and in that movement-making time, it was so much work. We felt like we were climbing up a huge mountain we might not get to the top of.
(05:03):
And in that work for individual voice and then community, sort of organized movement youth voice, we spent more than a decade before we were able to imagine the power of us helping other young people. This peer-to-peer having answers and insight and wisdom for each other built purely on our lived experience. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and therefore you might trust me more than you might trust initially other helping roles and professions. And so your work, being in a school every day, being that safe space, that non-judgmental place that youth are choosing is the actualization of a dream that it actually took us a really long time to even start dreaming about.
Rowan (05:56): 1,000%, Johanna. I have so many memories of starting in this field and having I think first no idea what I was getting myself into and then falling deeply in love with the advocacy side of it and the fervent belief that young people had voices that needed to be listened to and struggling to find someone to listen to me in that and someone to respect me in that.
(06:33):
It’s been such a pleasure and sometimes shock to work with the Youth Wellness Coaches and see how something that I never thought was possible, of a young person being in a supportive role in a school and being embraced and uplifted by school staff, that was never something that occurred to me as a possibility. So it’s been amazing to kind of watch that journey over the past 12 years. Johanna, I’m wondering you were who I go to when I am thinking about the history of the youth movement and the history of youth peer support, and I think it’s something that’s incredibly important to have an awareness of to see all this growth. Could you explain where this all started and specifically kind of talk about what I’ve heard you refer to as the beautiful accident of youth peer support?
Johanna (07:43): I will be the first to say it is a story that started before me and I was grateful to be welcomed into what truly became my family of youth advocates within the youth movement. The evolution of youth voice, of young people having individual rights to voice, choice, guidance of their care grew on the shoulders of the disability rights movement and the adult recovery movement around the rallying cry, “Nothing about us without us.” There’s a story that is pre-Johanna time of young people who were individual advocates in their communities being brought together at a conference and then put in another room like, “Young people, go over there and hang out with each other.” And that group of young people did not like that, completely understanding and they stormed the plenary stage and took the mic and said, “You can’t talk about how to fix the system that’s supposed to be supporting us if we aren’t in the room with you.”
(08:54):
And that launched a very specific call to action for some work that our federal government was doing funded by SAMHSA to establish system of care in communities across the country. And that overlapped and connected to some really great work that was happening in several different states where there were pockets of a few young people who were being asked to advise in these primarily behavioral health system change efforts, later to be joined by youth advocates with lived experience and child welfare and juvenile justice as well. The individual work was a lot about “How do we design supports where young people are heard in their care planning?” So it was a lot of opportunity to say, “Here’s how y’all didn’t help me and here’s what would’ve helped me.” And a lot of training for young people and adults about how to really listen to young people. That evolved into local community mobilization, which is a big part of the work that I did when I joined the youth movement.
(10:00):
I had a role at Youth MOVE National where we were supporting a chapter network, which is really young people in a school or in a behavioral health clinic or on their living room couch, getting together to say, “Hey, if we organized and named ourselves, we wouldn’t just be individual youth asking for things, we would be a collective.” And that rolled up into a vision of having a movement of youth advocates with lived experience. Throughout that, I think the word advocacy was the key message. We felt a lot of pressure to be loud and proud to say, “Young people have a voice that has wisdom. You should listen to us. Our work will be better if we are at the table.” It included a lot of emphasis on the individual youth voice being elevated. We spent a lot of time talking to state policymakers or county policymakers who had funding decisions to say, “Help us get to the table as your advisors, your consultants, your co-designers.”
(11:10):
And then in 2013, Rowan, you referred to what I feel like was a beautiful accident. Our youth movement, which had been running parallel to really excellent advocacy by adults with lived experience, by family members who were articulating that their role of caregivers of young people navigating this system was also valid, necessary lived experience. There was a movement and an emphasis on peer support roles. The youth movement wasn’t totally there. We were helping each other. I call the youth movement colleagues my family because they were. When I walked into the room and met people from Youth MOVE for the first time in my life, I realized I belonged faster than I’d ever felt like I belonged in a room before. And that was because they got me, I got them. We didn’t have to retell what happened to us and what formed us. The lived experience was in us and around us and it was okay, it was beautiful in these spaces.
(12:18):
So we were helping each other heal and grow and hope and find resiliency. We didn’t name that though. That was just the energy that kept us moving forward collectively. Our work was this advocacy, get us microphones, get us language in bills and in processes that center our voice. With this emphasis on peer support in family and adult roles, there was a convening for the children’s behavioral health field, very important, in 2013 where CMS, the Center for Medicaid Services and SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, was preparing to send out direction to the states of what would a comprehensive service array look like for children and youth. And there were advocates in that room who wanted family peer support on the list, which was great. They had voice at the table. They had allyship with federal partners who also thought it was important to tell the states that this would be an important thing to start funding with their Medicaid dollars.
(13:23):
And in that room, there was at least one that I know of, but maybe more who said, “We don’t do family voice without youth voice. It should be family and youth peer support.” And when that bulletin was published, it said Family and Youth Peer Support. I call that the beautiful accident because we weren’t there. That was not our advocacy call that we were organized around. And I remember being on the team of young adult advocates who were called and they said, “What are the standards for youth peer support providers?” And I didn’t know what a standard was and yet was being asked to answer these questions.
(14:10):
So Gina, you walking into a school building and offering peer support is like, oh my gosh. We struggled in those next couple of years to wrap our head around as an entire country of youth advocates. How can we add this advocacy for a helping service support to our individual youth voice advocacy effort while being asked a ton of super technical questions that we did not know the answers to? So shout out to all of my colleagues who had to learn about 1915 I-waivers with me before we finished college. So to know that we were gifted that opportunity and that we got it together to get ready to take all of this energy that was there for youth voice and to channel it towards youth peer support is a really important part of our history and I love seeing and hearing your work making it real in the community today and tomorrow.
Gina (15:14): Johanna, this is so interesting to hear and I really appreciate you sharing this history. I think to me peer support makes so much sense and I can’t imagine a world where people didn’t think it would make sense or weren’t even thinking about it. And I love to hear that it sort of started with this advocating for youth movement and sort of turned into this really cool idea of utilizing lived experience and support from one another. I think a big part of my role is helping youth advocate for themselves and being that support and knowing how hard it was for me to advocate for myself. And so it sort of seems like a full circle moment of utilizing both of those really cool things and having them come together as one and sort of the near-aged peers and that combination today.
Johanna (16:12): When you say that, Gina, one of the things that I think about is that developing a focus on youth peer roles opened up a whole pathway to youth advocates to find purpose and energy in this space. I was someone who struggled a lot with, I don’t want the microphone, I don’t want to be the person on the stage or in the newspaper or writing these headlines. I want to be at my desk writing stuff and doing work and talking to bureaucrats and policy makers to make change. And so I struggled to find my space. The original movement was a lot of take the microphone in very traditional leadership ways.
(16:55):
I tried to be a part of modeling that our lived experience was going to be valuable in many different ways and we didn’t all, and shouldn’t all lead from the front. And then when youth peer roles opened up, a whole bunch of my colleagues who didn’t want the microphone or what I did found their path to help others to give back, to make that connection. And so I’ve seen so many young people stay in this work in this space because we’ve been able to diversify the places and where we value the places where we value the wisdom of lived experience. And I love that I was a small part in helping to craft more roles and pathways for each of us to choose.
Rowan (17:44): This is such an amazing conversation. And Johanna, I will admit that I haven’t thought about 1959 in a very long time, and I was okay with that. I also remember learning obsessively about it in meetings where I don’t think I understood half of what was being said, but knew that I needed to. And it’s so phenomenal to kind of realize full circle, like you said, Gina, where we’ve come and that we have all of these opportunities for young people to get into this work, to explore it and to develop these skill sets and develop a passion that these opportunities didn’t exist 20 years ago.
(18:31):
And it’s so exciting to see and really makes me hope and wonder what comes after this because if within the last 12 years of my career, we’ve gone from youth peers, youth advocates just starting to exist, the certification process starting to be developed, to now having youth peer workers in schools across an entire state. And I know Massachusetts isn’t the only state that does it, and peers in general exploding across the field, it makes the future that much brighter and that feels incredibly important to talk about right now.
Johanna (19:22): Rowan, I think what we’re doing right now is a huge part of what we need in order to move forward, having conversations. Gina, it’s a joy to be sharing space with you on this podcast today, and it’s such a great storytelling exchange of “I am an elder in this movement and you are new in your leadership“ and this type of exchange, storytelling, sharing our lessons, keeping each other motivated to move forward seems to be the key to how the youth movement channels the next 20 years.
Gina (19:58): And I’m so grateful to be a part of this conversation. I think every day I walk into work and I understand the importance of my role sort of in an everyday sort of way, but getting to see the way it’s been continuously built on different people and their work, I think gives me a deeper understanding of just the potential of this role and all of the great work, all of the history that this role has been built on.
Rowan (20:31): It’s so phenomenal to have been given the opportunity to bring you two together. I’ve been quietly plotting about this for a while and I’m glad that I was given the opportunity to. Gina, thank you for all the phenomenal work that you’re doing in your schools and thank you so much for joining us today.
Gina (20:51): Thank you Rowan and thank you Johanna for including me in this conversation. It’s been a joy.
Rowan (20:57): Johanna. I always love any opportunity to talk with you, so thank you so much for joining us today.
Johanna (21:03): It’s been a pleasure and I look forward to continuing the conversation.
Rowan (21:07): And to our listeners, join us next time on Changing the Conversation.
Erika Simon, Producer (21:11):
Visit c4innovates.com and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube for more resources to grow your impact. Thank you for joining us. This episode was produced by Erika Simon and Christina Murphy. Our theme song was written and performed by Peter Hanlon. Join us next time on Changing the Conversation.
Listen to other episodes in the Next Generation Recovery Leaders series.