Peer Support as a Tool for Community Care: “Nothing About Us, Without Us”

Abstract

In the face of socio-political marginalization, frontline communities reclaim power by harnessing peer wisdom and resilience. The year 2020 marked the confluence of a global pandemic and widespread resistance against anti-Black racism and police violence, highlighting the value of peer voices and community perspectives. To dismantle and transcend carceral approaches to community care, the field of social work is invited to join a larger anti-carceral mental health movement that honors lived experience and works alongside peers to build identity-affirming structures of mental health care. This article examines the ways in which frontline communities benefit from expanded access to anti-carceral formal and informal peer support as a mental health safety net that interrupts harm and prioritizes agency, consent, and self-determination. This paper broadens social work’s conceptualization of peer support through theoretical frameworks of anti-carceral social work, abolition, and intersectionality. Social work and its adjacent fields are called to urgently center Black liberation, collective healing, and community care by advocating for the integration of formal and informal peer support into mental health policy and practice. This paper strategically leans into a lineage of critical peer thought scholarship by utilizing footnotes and citations to model the ethical acknowledgment of peer labor within human rights movements. This intentional structure promotes radical solidarity that resists the exploitation of people with lived experience.

Me too! A case study of gendered victimization and feminist development in a Swedish peer support organization for people with experiences of criminalization and substance abuse

“…Envisioning the future of desistance research, Maruna ( 12 ) highlights the central role of lived experience and argues that desistance should be reframed as a social movement “as that concept moves from the Ivory Tower to the professional world of probation and prisons, back to the communities where desistance takes place” [p. 11; see also ( 20 )]. Indeed, the expression “nothing about us without us” has been key to various social justice movements ( 21 ) and is also evident in the field of convict criminology ( 22 ), where lived experiences is moved from margins to center by formerly incarcerated academics ( 12 ). 1 Peer support has been described as a political act that builds empowerment by telling and listening to each other’s stories ( 23 ).…”

Information acquisition and dissemination among a sample of people who inject drugs in Australia

“…The importance of including people with lived experience (i.e., peers) in service delivery, research, policy and evaluation is widely recognised, first gaining traction in disability activism ('Nothing About Us Without Us') in the 1990s and since expanding to a broad array of groups that are often marginalised from political, social and economic opportunities [1]. The highly stigmatised and criminalised nature of drug use makes peer work within the alcohol and other drug (AOD) field especially important, and peers have a long history of organising, and being central to the development of, harm reduction initiatives [2].…”