ACG’s Peer Specialist Core Recovery Curriculum training program is the basis for its Peer Specialist certification training.  It consists of 24 1-hour sessions that are designed to help the participants pass the state certification test, give them basic skills to do their work as a peer specialist and enable them to embrace their recovery experience as their greatest gift in working with their peers.  It is the approved training program in almost half of the states and is one of the approved training programs for the Veterans Administration.

ACG’s Peer Specialist Core Recovery Curriculum Train-the-Trainer program is designed to train local Peer Specialists to participate as trainers in future Peer Specialist training programs.  Usually each of the 8 selected trainees gets to facilitate one of the 24 training sessions and have his or her presentation critiqued verbally by other trainees and in written form by the ACG master trainer.  While the trainees get a Facilitator’s Manual with detail facilitation procedures notes and valuable up-front, hands-on experience, the Train-the-Trainer program is not designed to develop a training faculty that can immediately present the entire 24-session Core Recovery Training Curriculum without the presence of an ACG master trainer.

ACG’s Peer Support Whole Health and Resiliency (PSWHR) is a two-day training program designed to train peer specialists to teach their peers to monitor and manage their overall health.  It is based on the belief that people with a chronic illness who are working to manage that illness and working to improve their overall health are more effective in getting another person with the same chronic illness to make life-style changes than trained clinicians without that chronic illness.

ACG’s Peer Support Whole Health and Resiliency Train-the-Trainer program is designed to prepare graduates of the PSWHR training program to train other peer specialists to implement the PSWHR program. A maximum of 12 people can be in the Train-the-Trainer program.  In order to participate they need to be graduates of the PSWHR program and have implemented the program in their agency and facilitated the 8-week support group.

ACG’s Catalysts for Recovery is a one-day program designed to help agencies incorporate Peer Specialists into the provider workforce.  It explores the shift in the public mental health system from stabilization and maintenance to recovery and resiliency, the impact that shift has had on the delivery of services and the emergence of the peer workforce as a viable catalyst in system transformation.  It offers participants the opportunity to discuss the challenges raised by this shift and the emergence of this new workforce and creates action plans to meet these challenges.

From time to time ACG staff will write articles, create training curriculum or teaching aids that will be posted here.