The clinical training
peer support deserves.
A top-tier curriculum for North Carolina's Certified Peer Support Specialists — twelve modules, forty hours, written with the rigor of a clinical textbook and the warmth of the work itself.
Lived experience is the credential. This is the training that meets it.
The work you are about to learn is one of the few in modern behavioral health where what you have survived is the qualification. That gift carries a weight. The curriculum that follows treats your story with the seriousness it deserves — and asks you to extend the same seriousness to the people whose stories will soon be entrusted to you.
We teach to the North Carolina standard — the framework administered by UNC's Behavioral Health Springboard, governed by 10A NCAC 27G, and informed by SAMHSA's recovery principles. We teach beyond it, too: where the field has moved, where the evidence has shifted, and where the discipline of presence actually lives.
Recovery & Wellness
SAMHSA's ten guiding principles and the four dimensions, taught as practical conversation tools.
Ethics & Boundaries
The NC Code of Conduct, scope of practice, and the discipline of holding the helping frame.
Trauma-Informed Care
ACEs, the four R's, and the science of not re-traumatizing the people who trust you.
Crisis & Safety
Columbia Protocol screening, Stanley-Brown safety planning, lethal-means counseling.
Documentation & HIPAA
Brief, behavioral, audit-defensible notes — and the special protections of 42 CFR Part 2.
Systems Navigation
LME/MCOs, Tailored Plans, and how to advocate without burning the bridge you'll need next month.
Written by people who do the work, for people about to do it.
Every module is written in service of the conversations that actually happen — the 2 a.m. text message, the group that goes sideways, the participant who tells you the thing they have told no one else. The curriculum is rigorous because the work is.
Read the full curriculumTrain here. Get hired there.
Carolina Peer Institute graduates have a direct pipeline into Generational Health — a North Carolina behavioral health organization that hires Certified Peer Support Specialists, pays them as the professionals they are, and supports the long arc of the career.
Your mind. Your power.
