EDUCATION & TRAINING

TRANSFORMING MENTAL HEALTH THROUGH PEER WISDOM

Our education and training programs prepare the next generation of peer leaders to reshape mental health and social services in Oregon and beyond. By centering queer, disabled, and chronically ill wisdom, we’re building a training model that doesn’t just certify peers — it changes the culture of care itself.

Launching FALL 2026:

Peer Support Specialist (PSS) Training

We are proud to launch Oregon’s first Peer Support Specialist (PSS) training designed by and specifically for LGBTQIA+, disabled, and neurodivergent communities.

This 40-hour program meets Oregon Health Authority (OHA) certification requirements and prepares participants to become OHA-certified Peer Support Specialists through a model built by and for people with lived experience.

What makes our trainings different?

  • • Rooted in queer and disability justice frameworks
    • Designed for people navigating trauma, neurodivergence, and chronic illness
    • Taught by peers with lived experience, for peers with lived experience
    • Grounded in decolonial, anti-oppressive, and liberatory approaches to care

Peer-Led Supervision & Mentorship

Certification is only the beginning. To truly sustain a peer workforce, we are creating Oregon’s first peer-led internship and supervision pipeline:

  • New peers are mentored by seasoned peers.

  • Supervision emphasizes resilience, collective care, and preventing burnout.

  • Internships provide real-world practice in safe, affirming environments.

This model ensures that peers don’t just graduate — they thrive.

Stay Connected

Our trainings will open for registration in late summer 2026, with the first cohorts beginning in Fall 2026.

✨ Want to be the first to know when applications open or chat with our team? CONTACT US

  • A smiling woman with curly red hair and blue glasses wearing a turquoise tank top and layered necklaces, standing in a warmly lit wooden interior.

    Mars Aqueous (they/them)

    LEAD FACILITATOR

    Mars is a creative strategist, energy worker, and psychiatric survivor working at the intersections of story, spirit, and systems change. They guide strategy, fundraising, design and communications, ensuring programs are rooted in lived experience, collective care and community wisdom.

    With over a decade in culture-shifting activism and community education, Mars is focused on expanding peer-delivered services and seeding a future of care that is just, imaginative, and liberated from colonial frameworks.

  • A man with a beard and piercings wearing a pink shirt, taking a selfie indoors against a wooden background.

    Nautilus Torello (he/they)

    LEAD FACILITATOR

    Nautilus Torello (he/they) has over a decade of experience transforming peer-delivered services into practices of justice, liberation, and collective care. With deep roots in queer and neurodivergent communities, he has served as peer supporter, director, and consultant, centering mutuality and shared power.

    As a certified trainer in Intentional Peer Support (IPS) and Queer IPS, Nautilus challenges pathologizing frameworks and builds culture-shifting approaches rooted in solidarity and community care.

 "Transformative mental health is about remembering we are not problems to be fixed, but people who need love and connection."

Support our WORK

Your donation supports the launch of our first training cohort—funding scholarships, compensating peer trainers for their labor and lived expertise, and sustaining the coordination needed to run a peer-led training program.

This work responds to a gap: peer support is often underfunded and shaped by systems that overlook lived experience—especially the realities of chronically ill and neurodivergent communities. Our training centers these perspectives, reimagining peer support as a relational, consent-based practice grounded in disability justice, interdependence, and the realities of fluctuating capacity and non-linear ways of living and healing.

With your support, we can reduce financial barriers, expand access to culturally specific training, and create real pathways into peer support roles.

Support this work and help grow a peer support ecosystem rooted in access, equity, and lived experience.