The basis
Workplace injury, chronic pain, three surgeries, and four years navigating provincial health, rehabilitation and compensation systems as a claimant. Twenty years of frontline communication work before the injury, including 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
Provincial Peer Support Worker Training Curriculum
PeerConnect BC · BCcampus · Province of British Columbia
Addiction Care and Treatment · 20 Mainpro+® credits
UBC Faculty of Medicine, Continuing Professional Development
Substance Use and Addiction Nursing Certificate
UBC School of Nursing with the BC Centre on Substance Use
Pain Foundations 1–3 · Moving Through Pain · Collaborative Pain Care
Pain BC
Eight peer worker practice courses
TowardTheHeart · BC Centre for Disease Control
Author — Equipped With Agency and companion workbook
2026
What is not held
Applied suicide intervention trainingnot held
Applied suicide intervention training — ASIST or safeTALK — is not held. Two of the seventeen sessions deal directly with suicidal thinking, and carry a facilitator note recommending that training. That is stated here rather than discovered at a booking.
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 →