Supervising Peer Workers
Peer support workers have personal experiences with challenges such as mental illness, substance use, trauma, and homelessness and provide non-clinical, strengths-based supports to people experiencing similar challenges. Peer workers complete formal training to learn how to provide these supports effectively in a wide range of settings.
Peer support is relatively new to behavioral health and health care services and systems. The functions and needs of peer workers are unique to their role. Strong supervision strategies are key to success. C4 staff have experiences as peer workers, supervisors of peer workers, and working in organizations to integrate peers.
We Can Help You
- Align policies, procedures, and practices to support and integrate peer workers
- Develop strategies to hire, supervise, support, and retain peer workers
- Support peer supervisors in:
- Building respectful, safe supervisory relationships and environments
- Maintaining supervisory relationships and connections over time
- Train peer supervisors to support peer workers in:
- Defining roles and responsibilities
- Acquiring competencies
- Navigating the work environment
- Working with colleagues
- Increase knowledge and skills, capacity, and infrastructure to integrate peers and peer-run organizations into behavioral health and health care services and systems
Learn more about partnering with us.
“[C4-operated] Bringing Recovery Supports to Scale Technical Assistance Center Strategy (BRSS TACS) helped us take the first step toward having conversations with other systems serving individuals with substance use issues regarding the integration of peer services and helped us to understand our common ground. We would not have this collaboration without BRSS TACS.” -C4 state partner
Our Experts
Learn More
- Providing Peer Support in Crisis Services—webinar recording hosted by Cheryl Gagne (60:07 minutes)
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Integration and Supervision of Peer Workers—webinar recording hosted by Cheryl Gagne (61:39 minutes)
- Supervision of Peer Workers resources: how to use these resources, supervision of peer workers guidelines, slide deck with trainer notes, supervisor self-assessment, supervision resource list—prepared by C4 staff with funding from SAMHSA's Bringing Recovery Supports to Scale Technical Assistance Center Strategy (BRSS TACS) project
- My Recovery Journey: Steven Samra—video (4:35 minutes)
- Integrating Peer Workers
- Substance Use and Mental Health Recovery Support
- Opioid Overdose Prevention and Support
- Medication-Assisted Treatment/Medication-Assisted Recovery
- Recovery Housing
- Stigma and Recovery
More about our expertise and our training and technical assistance approaches and offerings.