The Neighborhood is a place where people with a common purpose join together to become a dynamic community. Peer Support Community Partners helps members use the tools and practices in the Neighborhood to strengthen the leadership and collective wisdom that are intrinsic to your community. Whether your group has 20 members or 200, the principles of peer support that guide Neighborhood activities will help empower you to achieve your community’s self-determined goals.
The basic tools available in the Neighborhood are familiar online methods that help people come together, communicate, make decisions, and take action. In general, they are the same tools as are used in places such as Facebook, but with three vital differences: The communities in the Neighborhood are private spaces, the leadership comes from the community as a whole, and the data is protected from commercial uses.
Currently, there are two groups of people in the Neighborhood building their own communities. One is frontline care providers who help people with substance-use issues. The other is people who are bereaved by a death from substance use.
● Frontline care providers are those who deliver ongoing, close-up, essential services to people who are or have been at high risk of dying from substance use.
● The bereaved are people who are grieving the loss of someone they care about whose death was caused by alcohol or other drugs (whether from accidental overdose or some other kind of accident, suicide, homicide, or medical complications).
Frontline care providers may be paid workers or volunteers or retired. They may be joining the Neighborhood as individuals, as fellow employees, or as people who work in the same geographical region or for a particular cause. The bereaved include people who are seeking help after someone close to them died and those who have experienced healing on their journey and now would like to help others (again, whether as volunteers or as service providers).
The two groups have their own community spaces in the Neighborhood that operate independently of each other. As they maintain their private, autonomous channels of communication in their separate communities, members can also interact in spaces where they share common ground.
Within each community, the broad purpose is the same: for frontline care providers to help each other and for bereaved people to help each other. The focus of that mutual helpfulness — the what, why, when, where, and how of it — is self-determined by the activities of the community members in collaboration with Peer Support Community Partners. Our role is to provide the communities with the support and assistance they need to accomplish their goals.
Peer Support Community Partners is presently funded to provide this community space for free to frontline care providers and people bereaved by a death from substance use in Massachusetts. We manage the Neighborhood and give members access to community-building tools they can use to develop and implement activities to care for each other in ways that focus on community members’ needs and priorities — and that work for them.
The expertise Peer Support Community Partners brings to the communities is, as our name suggests, centered around the principles and practices of peer support and community-building through collaboration. We are here to help you create and participate fully in a space where you feel empowered to accomplish what is most important to you.
Welcome to your Neighborhood.
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