“Building Peer Trust by Sharing Lived Experience”- November 2024 Community of Practice
November 2024 CPS & CPPS Community of Practice
“Building Peer Trust by Sharing Lived Experience”
with Linda Lenzke
Thursday, November 14th, 2024 from 1:30 – 3:00 pm CT
Facilitator:
- Linda Lenzke (she, her, hers)
Linda Lenzke (she, her, hers) is the LGBTQ+ AODA Advocate for the OutReach LGBTQ+ Community Center in Madison, Wisconsin. She is a Wisconsin Certified Peer Specialist. As a member of the OutReach Harm Reduction Services Team, Linda fields inbound calls from community members, and facilitates weekly recovery meetings, including an LGBTQ+ Al-Anon Meeting for families and loved ones of people struggling with alcohol and substances, and Progress Not Perfection: LGBTQ+ Harm Reduction Recovery Meeting for people seeking recovery from alcohol, substances, and harming behaviors.
As a person in recovery for almost 40 years, Linda shares her lived experience with those who still struggle. Linda is a writer and storyteller and has presented at conferences and workshops on the subjects of harm reduction recovery, trauma, stigma, and the power of sharing stories from our lived experiences as pathways to recovery. With her OutReach colleagues, Linda conducts educational presentations in Madison, Dane County, and Southcentral Wisconsin. Linda is a member of the Suicide Prevention and Harm Reduction Coalition (SPHRC), and the Queer Care Collective.
Description:
As Peer Specialists, one of our primary objectives is to earn and nurture trust with the peers with whom we’re working. To the best of our ability, we are tasked with creating relationships by active listening, ensuring mutual respect, and partnering and designing recovery plans to achieve the objectives the peer has identified. It’s critical that we need to meet the peer where they are.
What differentiates a Peer Specialist from other care providers is that we share our lived experience with our peers. We may have different origins of trauma, experience with substance use, stigma, and/or behavioral health challenges, yet our lived experience can help provide hope and pathways to recovery by working hand-in-hand with our peers.
To build and nurture this trust, it’s incumbent that we share our own stories, the challenges we’ve faced, and the struggles and successes we’ve encountered while overcoming them. It’s important to acknowledge our differences, identify common experiences, be accepting and nonjudgmental, as we listen closely to the peer, to identify how we can help. It’s critical that we remember that we are partners with our peers and our role is to support them as they navigate their journey of recovery and behavioral health.
In this webinar we will learn how sharing stories about our lives, and listening to the lived experience of our peers, helps build and facilitates trust. Interactive exercises in breakout groups will help demonstrate auditory, visual, and kinesthetic communication and learning styles.
Feedback Survey/CEH Information:
We invite you to please fill out the evaluation survey link (click here) if you attended this community of practice gathering or if you watch the recording. The survey will close at 4:30pm on Thursday, November 28th. Certificates of Participation will be sent to those completing the evaluation form by 4:30pm on December 5th, 2024. No evaluation surveys will be accepted for CEH credit after the evaluation survey’s closing date/time.
This website is managed and maintained by staff at Access to Independence working on the Wisconsin Peer Specialist Employment Initiative. The words, views, and values presented herein are not necessarily representative of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
