What is Intentional Peer Support (IPS)? IPS is a powerful framework for thinking about and creating transformative relationships. Practitioners learn to use relationships to see things from new angles, develop greater awareness of personal and relational patterns, and support and challenge each other in trying new things. IPS is used across the world in settings ranging from peer-run programs to community managed organisations to traditional mental health and human services. IPS comes from a history of grassroots alternatives that focus on building relationships that are mutual, explorative, and conscious of power.
For nearly twenty years, IPS has been inspiring and training people all over the world to be intentional about the way they connect and build mutual relationships. Based on Shery Mead’s book, Intentional Peer Support: An Alternative Approach, IPS Core Training is a 5-day introduction to this innovative framework and is designed to have you practicing right away. In a highly interactive environment, participants learn the tasks and principles of IPS, examine assumptions about who they are, and explore ways to create relationships in which power is negotiated, co-learning is possible, and support goes beyond traditional notions of “service.” IPS is all about opening up new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing, and here we examine how to make this possible.
The IPS Core Training is for anyone interested in mutual support and has been widely used as a foundation training for people working in both traditional and alternative mental health settings. Specific topics covered include:
- The 4 tasks: Connection, Worldview, Mutuality & Moving Towards
- The 3 principles: From helping to learning, individual to relationship, fear to hope
- History of the Peer Support Movement
- Rethinking old roles and old ways of relating
- Understanding the impact of trauma
- Examining power and privilege
- Listening from a position of not knowing and for the untold story
- Talking about suicide and self-harm
- Moving beyond problem solving
- Negotiating boundaries and limits
- Moving towards shared risk and responsibility
- Looking at crisis as an opportunity
- Navigating challenging scenarios
- Sustaining IPS through co-reflection
Why an Expression of Interest? inside out & associates and Being are keen to see further opportunities for people to learn IPS in NSW and Australia. While we feel pretty certain there are many peer workers out there who are keen to learn this approach, we need to be confident we have enough interest to fill the five day workshop in order for the training to be viable.
I’m interested! What do I need to do now? Simply contact kath@insideoutconversations.com.au or 0435 348 168 to register your interest by 27th August 2018. No payment is required at this stage.