Core

Develop Essential Skills for Peer Support

Begin Your Journey of Growth

IPS Core Training

(5 days in-person / 10 days virtual)

The Core Training is our foundational training for learning and practicing Intentional Peer Support. This training is for anyone interested in mutual support and has been widely used for people working in both traditional and alternative mental health settings.

Based on Shery Mead’s book, Intentional Peer Support: An Alternative Approach, our Core Training is a 40-hour 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.

Ready to Join an IPS Core Training?

View a flyer with more information about the IPS Core Training

Information for organizations to read BEFORE booking a training or places on a training for their team

Sign up here if you are interested in learning about future Core trainings you can attend. Visit our Eventbrite page to view all our available trainings.

IPS Central Eventbrite

During the Core Training, participants learn to:

  • Seek ways to connect, become aware of disconnects, and work to reconnect

  • Explore how we have “come to know what we know”

  • Strive for mutuality in relationships

  • Stay curious, question assumptions, and own judgements and opinions

  • Open up new ways of listening

  • Use experience to relate and build trust

  • Name and negotiate power in relationships

  • Navigate conversations about suicide and self-injury

  • Approach crisis as an opportunity to grow

  • Share risk and responsibility

  • Focus on the quality of relationships instead of fixing one another

  • Pay attention to the impact of clinical and labeling language

  • Understand how trauma affects lives

  • Keep the energy in relationships moving towards what we want

  • Understand peer support in the context of social change and social justice

  • Learn to see altered states or non-consensual reality in new ways, and to connect with people having these experiences

The 4 Tasks:

Connection, Worldview, Mutuality and Moving Towards

  • History of Peer Movement
  • Rethinking Old Roles and Ways of Relating
  • Understanding the Impact of Trauma
  • Examining Power and Privilege
  • Navigating Challenging Scenarios
  • Using Co-Reflection to Maintain Values

The 3 Principles

Helping to Learning, Individual to Relationship, Fear to Hope

  • Listening Differently and With Intention
  • Working Towards Shared Responsibility
  • Moving Beyond Problem Solving
  • Negotiating Boundaries and Limits
  • Looking at Crisis as an Opportunity
  • Creating a Vision
The Training reminds me to have compassion for myself and that my story matters.
- AJ, Greenfield Community Coordinator, Wildflower Alliance
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The IPS training has been really informative and I’m grateful to receive the training. Gives a lot of self-awareness and tools that I can not only use in peer support but everyday life.
- IPS Training Participant
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IPS has enabled me to grow into my role as a peer supporter, creating hope and resilience through action together.
- James Sutherland, Dunedin, Peer Supporter, Life Matters Suicide Prevention Trust
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IPS has changed the way I think about relationships, emboldening me to try new things and think in new ways.
- IPS Training Participant
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The IPS training course challenges all aspects of ourselves through acknowledging our worldview and definitely completing the exercises in the manual! It's a cliche but it is actually life changing!!
- IPS Training Participant
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The IPS training has expanded my ability to do this work and I am thankful for that. Not only will it benefit my clients but also my personal growth as a human being.
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This training is invaluable for anyone interested in 'peer support', and more broadly, anyone who would like to think deeply about their ways of relating, their worldviews, the social systems we live in, and possibilities for change.
- IPS Training Participant
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IPS is truly transformational.
- IPS Training Participant
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This training was not only informative, well-facilitated, and inspiring, but also a wonderful injection of hope as I'm imaging all of us using these principles to create some positive change.
- IPS Training Participant
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It is dynamic, it is engaging in a very meaningful way. I am not a zoom person but this really was an epiphany of epiphanies, a series of light bulb moments.
- IPS Training Participant
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IPS gave the tools to look into how relationships are formed, held, grown, and nurtured giving the respect to the individual; towards their own way forward!
- IPS Training Participant
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IPS is a living, breathing movement to empower all of us.
- IPS Training Participant
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Join the Movement

Are you ready to be part of a global community that values growth, mutual support, and transformative change?
Explore the world of IPS and learn how you can contribute to a movement that's reshaping mental health support, one relationship at a time.

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