The basis
A workplace injury, chronic pain, and three surgeries. Four years navigating the provincial health, rehabilitation and compensation systems as a claimant. Before the injury, twenty years of frontline communication work. That included specialist customer resolution, and high-volume public health contact during the provincial COVID-19 vaccination rollout.
Under the B.C. definition, a peer is somebody with shared lived experience. That is the qualification that makes peer support peer; the training below is what makes it safe.
Training held
Pain Foundations
Pain BC — the full pathway: pain physiology, biopsychosocial assessment, self-management, and living with disability and chronic pain
Clinical CPD from the UBC Faculty of Medicine
Accredited physician CPD — addiction care and treatment, motivational interviewing, somatic symptom and functional neurological disorder, autism and neurodiversity
Provincial Peer Support Worker Training Curriculum
Province of British Columbia · PeerConnect BC with BCcampus — the provincial standard for peer support work, which is what this series is
Peer worker practice courses
BC Centre for Disease Control · TowardTheHeart — peer-to-peer debriefing, grief and healing, conflict resolution, and holding a boundary in peer work
Substance Use and Addiction Nursing
UBC School of Nursing with the BC Centre on Substance Use — substance use as a health matter rather than a character one
safeTALK — Suicide Alertness for Everyone
LivingWorks — the suicide alertness training the two hardest sessions recommend
FOIPPA Foundations — privacy and access
B.C. Ministry of Citizens' Services — the province's own privacy training, which is what this site and the app's privacy claims are built on
Author — Equipped With Agency, its companion workbook, and Shoulder the Bill
3 ISBN-registered titles, in print, and as e-books where the form suits them
What is never claimed
Not a counsellor, not a therapist, not a clinician. Those titles are protected in British Columbia and are not used here about anybody. Nothing delivered is counselling, therapy or treatment — not in a room, not in an email, not in conversation afterwards.
Where this came from, and what it rests on
What this is built on
The research the series draws on, what it measures, and what it has not yet shown.
Evidence and standards →The Original Theory
The foundation as first written, before it became a system. A provenance document rather than a starting point.
Read the original →In person
Waypoint
A sign, a chair and a person to talk to. Free to sit, no appointment — what it is, and how to support it.
What the booth is →