Section 3
The “Peer Specialist”
The aim of the peer specialist is to incorporate people with lived and living experience of drug and alcohol use as service providers without requiring advanced degrees or certifications. Peer specialists play an essential role in making people feel comfortable, understood, and not judged for their decisions or experiences. Peer specialists can look like group facilitators, mentors, program coordinators, or any variety of role.
Some of the caveats of the peer specialist role is that it may limit people’s expertise into a narrow “pigeon-hole”, they may face stigma due to their job title, and there are often limits to job growth opportunities. Peer specialist roles are chronically underpaid, despite their unique lived experience informing the organization as a whole. Paying peer specialists appropriately, offering peer specialists job growth opportunities and leadership roles, and ensuring that peer specialists have a say in their own role are important factors for making these roles equitable. Adequate pay structures might look at someone’s years of lived experience as job experience – for example, someone whose been in recovery for 10 years would have 10 years of relevant work experience.
Drug User Leadership
Drug user leadership, different from the general role of peer specialists, is the incorporation of people who are currently living in drug and alcohol use into program decision-making, and adequately compensating people for their expertise. Creating paid community surveys, including people who use your services in decision-making for program budgets or upcoming events, and hiring or retaining people with living experiences of substance use are elements that can greatly empower people. While the needs of a position may require someone to have a certain level of stability and organization, many people who are currently engaging in substance use have these skills in addition to the awareness of the current trends or happenings in the drug supply. Not requiring drug testing – while maintaining reasonable boundaries like intoxication during a shift – is a small way to make these positions more accessible to people with living experiences.
Funding and Payment Structures
Being Native and doing this work is not just a 9-5 job. This means that ideally our compensation scales should reflect the unpaid labor that goes into being a community member and doing work on our “off hours”, all of the cultural and community insight we offer through our living experiences, and the ways that we are constantly learning best practices in action. Developing payment structures which reflect this expertise, and incorporating regular pay raises, both legitizimize the invaluable perspective of staff while also preventing burnout or overwhelm.
Funding structures can often be inflexible and restrictive. Changes to political administrations, organizational funding, and social climates can influence the availability of funds through “traditional” means. Grassroots options of crowdraising money, organizing benefit events, or Being creative with grantwriting and finding ways to get the work done we need to do, while still maintaining the As Native communities always do, we have to navigate multiple worlds and can bring forth those experiences into financial aspects.
Program Readiness
Program readiness is the concept of determining “where we’re at” with a program. If we already have an established mutual aid project, organization, or effort and we’d like to incorporate the practices mentioned in this guide, we should determine where our capacity allows for it. A program readiness tool is a way to take inventory of what we have around us, our skills and networks we can tap into, and how comfortably we can grow into reaching our programmatic goals. There are many program readiness tools available for Native communities on a variety of topics, so be sure to find one that feels reflective of your goals!
Preventing Burnout
Burnout is when our mental, physical, and spiritual wellness is exhausted, over-stressed, and overwhelmed beyond our ability to self-regulate.
Burnout is a constant factor of life in this field. Not only is the work sometimes challenging or busy in unexpected ways, we are also people within the community and our jobs are never really over – after hours we continue to be cousins, aunties, uncles, nephews, nieces, siblings, and relatives to our people. People often enter this work with high energy, enthusiam, and a “yes to everything” attitude. If our programs aren’t set up to avoid exploiting this enthusiasm, we run the risk of overworking people to the point that they become burnt out without realizing it. While compensation is one major factor in preventing burnout, making sure there is structures in place to provide generous time off and supporting people in taking it, coordinating regular wellness check-ins where people are able to decompress about their jobs, and also knowing that our staff or grassroots collective members are also community members and deserve to enjoy the fun, social, and resource activities we offer.