Peerpocalypse Workshop Interest Survey List
NOTE: Workshops from our ethics series are not included in this list.
All In: Rooted in Practice, Rising as Leaders
Presenting Team: Tiffany Atkinson and Leticia Longoria-Navarro
Workshop Description: Too often, agencies hire peers without fully embracing the principles that make peer support powerful. Rooted in lived experience, values like mutuality, authenticity, hope, and shared power can transform organizations. This workshop explores how agencies can stay rooted in peer principles while rising beyond peer roles to shape culture and leadership. Through peer-led conversation and real-world examples, participants explore what works, what doesn’t, and what becomes possible when organizations go all in at every level.
Anchoring Hope: Rooted and Rising Through Peer Advocacy in PSH
Presenter: Tinesha Harmon-Cage
Workshop Description: In the complex ecosystem of Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), clinical intervention often meets its limits at the front door. This presentation explores the transformative power of "Anchoring Hope" - The practice of utilizing Behavioral Health Navigators and Peer Specialists to bridge the gap between housing stability and true recovery. We will learn how the peer-navigator model is actively dismantling barriers to care, humanizing the housing landscape, and creating sustainable pathways for long-term health.
Balancing Your Wellness
Presenting Team: Cherokee Council, Jose Martinez, William Councell, Eugene (Smokey) Wewa
Workshop Description: As peer support specialists we often experience burnout, compassion fatigue, and transference. Day in and day out, we support those who have gone through situations similar to us, and we often forget to care for ourselves as well. This workshop focuses on balancing yourself so that you're balanced for others. This skill is beneficial for supervisors and peer workers alike.
Battlefield Medicine: Veterans Evolving Experiences and Perspectives
Presenting Team: Joseph Liberati and Aaron Barrow
Workshop Description: Changes in wartime procedures and battlefield medicine have changed the ways that Veterans experience trauma and the resulting conditions associated with that trauma. These experiences have led to changes in how we care for those who have gone through these traumatic events.
Becoming Who You are Meant to Be: Utilizing Personal Healing as Professional Empowerment
Presenter: Tori Smith
Workshop Description: This session challenges the myth that healing and leadership are separate lanes. Participants will explore how personal healing directly strengthens professional presence, clarity, and impact. Through reflective dialogue and practical insight, attendees will learn how to leverage lived experience, boundaries, and self-awareness as assets not liabilities. The goal: show up whole, lead aligned, and operate from a place of purpose, not burnout.
Between Lived Experience and Leadership: Navigating Power, Ethics, Sustainability Together
Presenting Team: Tara Moreno-Wallen, MA, ADS-RT and Carolina Ayala
Workshop Description: Peer-led organizations are transforming behavioral health, yet leadership in the peer space carries unique, often unspoken challenges. This presentation explores how leaders with lived experience navigate power, ethics, boundaries, and system pressures while maintaining integrity and wellness. Drawing from grassroots and executive leadership, presenters examine dual roles, ethical gray areas, and relationship dynamics. Participants will gain practical insight into sustainable leadership strategies and how organizations can better support peer leaders without compromising values.
Beyond Survival: Reclaiming Wellness for Black Communities Through Peer Support
Presenting Team: Leor Beverly and Kyle Hill
Workshop Description: Black communities have long demonstrated resilience in the face of systemic barriers. This workshop explores how we move beyond survival toward holistic wellness by centering culturally specific peer support as a tool for healing and liberation. This session is designed for practitioners, advocates, and community members committed to transforming systems and reclaiming wellness as a birthright. Together, we will envision and practice what it means to heal in community, for community.
Boundaries, Burnout Prevention, and Everyday WRAP for the Peer Workforce
Presenting Team: Chrissy Schayer and Kelly Uhland
Workshop Description: Peers are often the emotional backbone of their teams, yet the demands of peer work can lead to burnout and boundary strain. This interactive workshop offers practical, peer-centered strategies for sustaining wellbeing in high-stress environments. Participants will identify personal stress patterns, practice compassionate boundary-setting language, and learn how to use core elements of WRAP® to create a mini wellness plan and adopt low-lift daily habits that support balance, resilience, and longevity in peer roles.
Civic Engagement: Why Your Story Matters!
Presenting Team: Megan Marx, MPA, NCPRSS and Nicole Pantley
Workshop Description: In this workshop, we will define the process of civic engagement. We will discuss the importance of sharing lived experience in the context of moving meaningful change forward; why telling our stories matters. We will examine the impact that stigma has on inhibiting civic engagement, and the significance that sharing our stories has on eliminating stigma. Finally, we will explore how to become involved with issues in the community that we care about.
Courage to Lead: Turning Lived Experience into Peer Leadership
Presenting Team: Frank Patka and Richard Inman
Workshop Description: A peer-led workshop for Peer Support Specialists who feel called to lead. Participants will explore how lived experience functions as expertise, identify transferable leadership skills, and examine common barriers such as imposter syndrome and systemic bias. Through reflection and discussion, peers will learn practical strategies for leading, advocating, and influencing systems without leaving peer values behind.
Creating: Art and Wellness
Presenter: Nat Heizenrader
Workshop Description: This is a workshop based on art as a therapeutic practice for mental illness symptoms, addiction challenges, and other life circumstances. Creating visual artwork boosts dopamine, lowers cortisol, and helps express difficult emotions. Creating drawings, paintings, and mixed media artwork can be very valuable. The workshop outcome would be the attendees gaining information about how art benefits our wellness, as well as the option to make their own small piece of art.
Cultural Responsivity: Applying Positionality to Peer Practice
Presenting Team: Itzel Ramirez and Lauren Maley
Workshop Description: This interactive workshop strengthens core peer support skills by exploring cultural and linguistic responsivity and its role in building trust and connection. Participants will learn the concept of positionality, examine how positionality influences peer practice, and engage in guided reflection on their own positionality. Through discussion and applied activities, attendees will develop practical strategies for expressing their positionality with peers in ways that support transparency, authenticity, and meaningful, lived-experience-based relationships.
Culturally Responsive Skills for Peer Leadership
Presenting Team: Lujein Alkreidi and Tanya Zaytseva
Workshop Description: Peers’ success in supervisory and leadership roles is shaped not only by job expectations, but by their ability to navigate culture, language, and community relationships. This session explores how culturally responsive supervision can support peer growth without replicating hierarchy or harm. Participants will gain strategies to support peers from diverse communities without sacrificing peer values, increase awareness of how culture shapes power and supervision, and strengthen retention while supporting workers and the communities they serve.
De-Escalation: Rooting in Trauma-Informed Care
Presenting Team: Ray Young
Workshop Description: Calm in a crisis is a skillset that takes practice and looks different in every situation. In this session, we will work through real-life escalated situations and learn a model of Trauma-Informed Care to support our clients when life gets bumpy and nothing else is working. You will:
1. Recognize the roots of escalated moments
2. Model 3 Peer Support skills that add calm in stressful situations
3. Apply 5 Trauma-Informed strategies in De-Escalation moments
Disruption, Discovery, and Balance: Finding Balance in Lived Experience Through Examining Our Story
Presenting Team: Greg Parnell and Sara Farmer
Workshop Description: As Peers Supporting Peers, self-care, sharing our story, and having balance in our lives is important. In this interactive workshop, we will follow along our facilitator’s recovery journey with a powerful presentation and worksheets. We will explore 6 recovery topic areas to focus on, see if we may need to make a change, add enhancements, or even let go of things to have better balance in our recovery story.
Equalizing Power Dynamics: Trauma-Informed Peer Supervision
Presenting Team: Pax Castaneda, b nutting, and Mordekai Tawney
Workshop Description: This interactive, peer-led workshop strengthens leadership through trauma-informed peer supervision. Participants will apply the six principles of trauma-informed care, examine and address workplace power dynamics, and practice collective accountability strategies that promote equity and trust. Using guided dialogue and applied exercises, attendees will identify supervision growth points and commit to implementing at least one trauma-informed strategy. This session supports emerging peer leaders in building healthier teams, ethical leadership practices, and sustainable organizational cultures.
Ethical Practices with a Trauma-Informed Approach for Substance Use Treatment
Presenter: Kate Fuqua, MS, CADC III, QMHP-C
Workshop Description: Participants in this workshop will learn how to:
Define trauma and trauma-informed care (TIC) and identify its relevance in substance use treatment.
Describe core ethical principles (autonomy, beneficence, justice, fidelity, veracity) and how they apply to SUD treatment.
Recognize symptoms of trauma, understand how trauma affects treatment engagement.
Prevent re-traumatization through ethical boundaries, communication strategies, and policy design.
Navigate ethically complex situations involving consent, confidentiality, relapse, mandated treatment, impaired clients, and staff-client power dynamics.
Apply a trauma-informed ethical decision-making model to real-world scenarios.
From Custody to Community: A Peer Recovery Model
Presenting Team: Genine Tuifua and Eric Dotson
Workshop Description: This workshop introduces a peer-led model rooted in harm reduction and social justice, beginning in jail and continuing into the community during re-entry. Participants will learn to build trust in high-trauma environments, support wellness, and coordinate basic needs such as housing, self sufficiency resources, and probation/legal compliance before release. Activities highlight how peers walk alongside individuals after re-entry, whether they engage in treatment, harm-reduction support, or peer support to ensure no one walks their path alone.
From Grassroots to Greater Grounds
Presenting Team: Brittany Wilson, PWS, PSS and Theresa Keys
Workshop Description: Bay Area First Step’s story shows what happens when recovery is led by those who’ve walked the path. From small grassroots beginnings in Coos County to a multi‑county network, this session celebrates 30 years of peer power, cultural healing, and adaptability in changing times. Discover how NARR-accredited and Indigenous housing, peer services, and our new Brookings Recovery Center weave hope into daily life—proving that community‑built recovery not only endures but transforms entire regions.
Highly Sensitive People: As Peer Providers and Participants
Presenter: Mae Muilenburg, PWS, CRM-2
Workshop Description: In this workshop, we will go over what a highly sensitive person is, including traits and differences in brain activity. We learn that these differences are over-represented in both the addiction and mental health communities. We evaluate what this means in the context of providing services and personal care, and will go over practical skills that peer providers can build to protect their longevity in the field — including building a boundary toolkit.
Housing for Hope
Presenting Team: Deena Feldes, Executive Director, Frank Squeglia, and Jeffrey Feldes
Workshop Description: Transcending Hope presents a peer-driven housing experience designed to support community members facing acute mental health challenges and substance use disorders. Our program emphasizes the importance of providing assistance in the least restrictive environments, allowing individuals to thrive within their communities.
Peer Support
Community Building
Goal Setting
Housing Navigation
By integrating these elements, we aim to create support systems that not only address immediate needs but also promote long-term recovery and resilience within the community.
How Imagination and Recreation Support Mental Wellness
Presenting Team: Jennifer Mendez and Jenny Cruickshank
Workshop Description: Training other Peers to expand their knowledge of how imagination and recreation can open new doors to healing and connection.
Ice Breaker: Creative Feeling Check in.
Power Point: Identify imagination and recreation and how to apply & personalize it in peer support.
Role Play: Put it into practice during training.
Questions and Discussions: How have you used imagination and recreation to heal?
Outcome: Empower peers to use creative tools to personalize peer support work.
Innovations in Peer Delivered Training Through Podcast Formats
Presenting Team: Lori Ashcraft and Patty Blum
Workshop Description: This innovative podcast model strengthens the behavioral health peer workforce by offering accessible, real‑world training grounded in lived experience. Guided by peer‑identified needs, each episode features leaders who share practical tools, authentic stories, and strategies for navigating complex systems. Flexible, portable, and values‑driven, the podcast supports skill development, professional identity, and continuing education. By honoring peer wisdom and promoting connection, it provides a low‑cost, meaningful approach to building a confident, resilient, and well‑supported peer workforce.
Like the Wind: Understanding the Importance of LGBTQ+ Affirming Spirituality
Presenter: Zach Harrell
Workshop Description: SAMHSA teaches us the importance of the 8 dimensions of wellness in relation to mental health and addiction recovery. LGBTQ+ peers are excluded from many mainstream spiritual practices, which leads to isolation. These traumatic experiences in religious spaces result in many rejecting any idea of spirituality. The 8 dimensions outlines spiritual wellness as a necessary part of us, and this workshop seeks to explore how to reconcile both truths.
Navigating Sexual Health in Recovery: Historical Insights and Modern Strategies
Presenter: Tanya Moore
Workshop Description: This workshop equips peers to teach and promote healthy sexuality within recovery. It reviews sexual‑health history in recovery, including HIV/AIDS-era shifts and the rise of peer support, and stresses integrating sexual well‑being into overall recovery. Participants learn current barriers, the peer role in reducing stigma and fostering open dialogue, and practical skills for teaching boundaries, healthy relationships, and more in groups as well as one-on-ones. Promotes advocating trauma‑informed, inclusive, peer‑led practices that use lived experience and build resilience.
Peer CoRe and Community Policing
Presenting Team: Kathy Quick and Tristan Schnoke
Workshop Description: This workshop will explore the Peer CoRe project that is currently underway in Lancaster County, PA. The workshop will detail the Peer CoRe Academy, which is a comprehensive training curriculum that prepares peer supporters to work alongside police officers in the community. Additional focus points in the workshop include a thorough review of data collected through the project, must-haves for the project to be effective, and an exploration of benefits and barriers to program implementation.
Practice Over Protection: Rooted and Rising
Presenter: Stacy Charpentier, Executive Director
Workshop Description: Rooted in the values and history of addiction recovery peer support, this interactive workshop explores how power shows up in peer relationships and practice. Using the Spectrum of Attitudes, participants will examine when peers unintentionally hold power through protection-focused responses and when power is intentionally shared to support autonomy and dignity of risk. Through applied scenarios and reflection, participants will strengthen values-based decision-making while rising as ethical leaders in peer recovery support.
Professional Development for Peers and Peer Supervisors
Presenting Team: Nicole Jackson, Director of Housing and Retention, and Lonie Ernesti
Workshop Description: This course aims to help peers and peer leaders define what professional development is and why it's so important. Next, we’ll learn to identify gaps in skill and areas of interest and finish by reviewing how to find appropriate training that covers the material. Attendees will have an opportunity to practice concepts and collaborate with their peers through both a paired and a group activity.
Reimagining Addiction and Addiction Recovery: A Paradigm Shift
Presenting Team: Aaron Barrow and Joseph Liberati
Workshop Description: The 14 years I've worked as an addiction peer have changed the way I approach addiction and addiction recovery. This change has helped me to live my best clean/sober life, help others find resiliency, and to avoid the cycle of burnout so common in this field. We will be having an interactive discussion about this change in perspectives and practices. Hopefully, you will take away concepts that will challenge your approach to addiction recovery.
Rising as Leaders: Maximizing Your Impact in Advanced Peer Roles
Presenting Team: Gloriana Hunter, Director of Learning and Performance, and Theresa Mast
Workshop Description: This workshop equips experienced peer specialists with the tools to rise into leadership. Attendees will first analyze current strengths and barriers to peer leadership advancement. Next, participants will develop crucial interpersonal and intrapersonal skills required to step into leadership roles. The workshop concludes by having each attendee create a concrete, actionable career plan, including 'I will' commitments, to spark immediate momentum and support a successful transition into advanced peer support roles.
Rising in Advocacy: From System Experience to System Change
Presenting Team: Kimberly Macklin, Trisha Ettestad, Joseph Brewer, Becky Shull, and Michael Macklin
Workshop Description: Learn practical skills for advocacy, partnering with leadership, and how to engage in local parent advisory councils in your district. Walk away empowered to turn your lived experience into systemic impact and join a growing movement of peer advocates across Oregon.
Rising Together Through Non-Carceral Peer Support
Presenting Team: Sharon Bliss and Audrey Williams
Workshop Description: Why is non-careceral peer support so important? Using IPS, we focus on relationships and offer alternatives to traditional systems of judgment, force, and punishment. Both mental health and addiction peers benefit when we offer community-based solutions: peer connections, consent, and self-direction. After exploring non-carceral peer support roots and practices, we meet in small groups (Espanol tambien) where participants can fully explore and embrace our role in maintaining our guiding principle: "Nothing About Us Without Us."
Rooted in Authenticity: Growing Self-Love and Resilience in the Workplace & Within
Presenting Team: Michelle Markus, THW, PWS, CRM, and Molly Griggs
Workshop Description: This interactive workshop invites participants to explore authenticity, self-love, and resilience as lived practices. Through grounding, storytelling, movement, reflection, and peer connection. We examine how self-love shows up in real life, especially in the workplace. Participants will identify personal tools, experiment with micro-rest, and leave with practical strategies to stay rooted, resilient, and aligned while navigating systems, relationships, and leadership.
Rooted in Community: Rising Lessons Learned Through Rural Peer-Led Services
Presenting Team: Sabrina Garcia, Savannah Staggs, Jenifer Metcalf, and Wylie Stokes
Workshop Description: We'll highlight how rural Oregon peer support specialists create culturally responsive harm reduction and recovery programs despite geographic and systemic barriers. Three organizations led by people with lived experience will share strategies for building rural services, integrating peers into SUD care, and centering dignity and autonomy. Through scenarios, discussions, and problem-solving, participants will learn practical tools to strengthen peer skills, sustain wellness, and influence policy offering real guidance for expanding peer-led programs in underserved communities
Rooted in Evidence, Rising in Practice
Presenter: Braunwynn Franklin
Workshop Description: Peer support is evidence-based—yet peers are often asked to justify their work using clinical frameworks that do not fit their role. This experiential session reframes evidence-based practice through a peer lens, centering lived experience, practice-based evidence, and outcomes. Participants explore peer-aligned evidence-based practices, including trauma-informed peer support, motivational interviewing (peer-adapted), WRAP-informed support, and harm reduction. Real-world examples highlight ethical application, role boundaries, and language that protects peer labor and strengthens peer support within systems.
Rooted in Justice: Forensic Peer Support Across the Criminal System
Presenting Team: Robert Jones and Jim Bollinger
Workshop Description: This workshop explores the critical role of peer support within the criminal justice system using principles from Forensic Peer Support (FPS) training and the Sequential Intercept Model (SIM). Participants will learn where and how peers can be effectively placed across justice settings, the strengths peers bring, common barriers to implementation, and advocacy strategies. Through discussion and applied examples, attendees will gain practical tools to support peer integration and advance recovery-oriented, diversion-focused responses.
Rooted in Legacy, Rising in Leadership: Generations of Peer Power
Presenting Team: Kristina Kapp and Laura Rose Misaras
Workshop Description: This intergenerational panel unites movement legends Jim Gottstein (PsychRights) and Dr. Dan Fisher (National Empowerment Center) with trailblazers KK Kapp (MindFreedom International/CDE) and Laura Rose (PeerGalaxy). Through facilitated dialogue, attendees will: (1) learn civil rights history that built peer support, (2) understand evidence-based recovery models including eCPR, (3) develop strategic advocacy skills for systems change, and (4) explore innovative pathways for expanding peer support through technology and cross-disability partnerships.
Rooted in Lived Experience: Ethical Self-Disclosure as Peer Support Tool
Presenting Team: Baby Timm, CPC, Michael Backman, Don Willows, and Ernesto Luthje
Workshop Description: Peer support is rooted in lived experience, yet ethical self-disclosure is a skill developed over time. Co-facilitated by HIV peer support specialists, this interactive workshop explores how peers use intentional self-disclosure to build trust, reduce stigma, and maintain boundaries. Grounded in HIV peer work and applicable across settings, participants will practice trauma-informed, culturally responsive approaches that honor identity while supporting sustainability and collective care.
ROOTED! Now RISE!!
Presenting Team: Claudia Wilcox, ICADC, CADCII, CRMII, THW/PSS, QMHAII, and Stephanie Sloane
Workshop Description: "Rooted! Now Rise" focuses on grounding professionals in core competencies to elevate their leadership impact. By becoming rooted in systemic knowledge and high-impact behaviors, individuals build the foundation needed to rise into influential roles.
Outcomes:
Establish a strong professional foundation through specialized resources and coaching.
Cultivate leadership skills to improve agency protocols and systemic outcomes.
Empower a new generation of leaders to drive recovery-focused results for those with substance use disorders.
Slots, Sports, Prediction Markets, Video Games: The Hidden Addictions
Presenting Team: Kitty Martz, Executive Director, and Brian Ward
Workshop Description: Participants will be able to:
Describe the neurochemistry involved in risk/reward related compulsive behaviors and addictions.
Recognize early warning signs of gambling-related harm in clients who do not identify as “gamblers,” including those engaged in gaming, trading, or prediction platforms.
Apply practical screening and conversation strategies to assess risk without shaming or moralizing behavior.
Use clear, accessible, destigmatizing language to discuss gambling harm and free service options with clients, peers, and affected others.
Supporting Autistic Peers: Practical Skills for Peer Support Workers
Presenter: Malcolm Aquinas, AuDHD CPSS
Workshop Description: Autistic peers are frequently misunderstood in peer support settings, especially during periods of sensory overload, shutdown, or burnout. This workshop offers practical, autism-informed peer support skills grounded in lived experience and peer values. Participants will learn to recognize autistic distress, reduce unintentional harm, and adapt peer responses to support nervous-system safety, autonomy, and mutuality. Interactive discussion and practice scenarios will support immediate application across peer roles and settings.
Supporting Voice Hearers in Crisis: An Evidence-Based Dialogue Approach
Presenting Team: Cindy Marty Hadge and Sera Davidow
Workshop Description: The workshop will use presentation, video, demonstrations and roleplay to teach people how to support individuals who hear voices and are having experiences that may be interpreted as a crisis. Participants will learn to interpret what is and isn't a crisis, and how to support the person to understand and move through the experience in real time. "Hearing voices" is used as an umbrella term and includes people who have visions, unusual beliefs, and more.
The Empowered Peer: Strengthening Connection, Practice, Insight, and Lived Wisdom
Presenter: Christina Bakker, CRM II, CADC II, QMHA II
Workshop Description: This immersive workshop reconnects peers to the deep roots of their lived experience while rising into purpose-driven leadership. Through grounding rituals, nervous system healing, chakra awareness, and heart-centered reflection, participants learn to share their stories in ways that evoke connection—not burnout. This session awakens inner resilience, strengthens authenticity, and equips peers with integrative tools to support others while staying aligned, empowered, and rooted in their own sacred healing journey.
The F Word: “Friends” in Peer Work
Presenting Team: Peter Starkey, Executive Director, Willita Ross, and Shana Powell
Workshop Description: This session explores the blurry line between peer and friend, and how to set boundaries that honor our history in mutual support without losing connection. We will walk through trauma-competent ways to hold space, strengthen relationships, and support growth while staying true to the scope of practice. Together we will look at how boundaries can be conversations that build people up, not walls that shut people out.
Transformation of Peers in Oregon’s Health System: Past to Present
Presenting Team: Shaun Cook, Program Analyst III, and Natalyn Begay
Workshop Description: ABSTRACT: Oregon Health Authority Traditional Health worker program workshop will highlight the foundational requirements for Peers in Oregon rooted in lived experience, share the historical background of peers in health transformations, building pipeline of peers leadership on supervision and scope of practice, and will emphasize the essential role (peers) in promoting health of the communities serve, impacts peers make in Oregon in delivering care.