My name is Emily Piper and I am a program manager with Yamhill County Health and Human
Services and I've been here for seven years. So I manage the community support
services program which we provide community-based supports to adults,
mainly adults with mental health challenges. We provide programs from the
community-based wraparound supports to supported employment, peer services, and
housing supports. We integrated peer support services probably about five to
six years ago and really tried to integrate them into just the very
various programs that we that we offer. I feel that peers offer a very unique
perspective and just have ability to connect with people in a very real and
supportive way through lived experience.
Well, we have very strong partnership with a lot of our community peer
network community peer organizations. We try to keep resources on hand here for
folks that utilize our services so that we can refer out. We also meet on a
quarterly basis. We try to get all of the peer organizations in the community
together just to be sharing resources and supportive being supportive of each
other and for some of our we also have direct contracts with some of our peer
support agencies. Project ABLE, for example, is one of them where we have a
direct referral process for to send people over for services or encourage
them to utilize those community-based supports.
So I think a website geared toward providing curriculum or additional
supports for peers is is excellent. You know there's been
handfuls of opportunities here and there for like peer wellness, specialist
certification, or peer support and employment certification, but to have a
site that will just combine specialized curriculum for various populations is
really, will be really helpful and just be a good resource for ongoing training.
I think you know anything the state and legislator can do to support peers in
across the state is is wonderful. It's such a unique perspective and I think the
more structure and support that we can bring will just allow us to offer it
offer a higher level of support or more support to people in the state.
So here at Yamhill County Health and Human Services we support ongoing
training and education to better support our community.
