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Our Initiatives

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Trauma-Informed Peer Support

Recovery Education

Criminal Justice

Supported Employment

Housing Support

Integrated Care

Innovations in Peer-Run Alternatives

Policy, Advocacy & Social Justice

Training, Technical Assistance, & Consultation

Contact: info@promiseresourcenetwork.org

Trauma-Informed Peer Support

As survivors of complex trauma, our peer support team is available to you on your journey.  In person or virtual, we are here to heal together.  No time limits, no insurance is required, no assessments needed, you can self-refer and it’s free!

Interested? Just call our Help Desk at (704) 390-7709 or fill out the interest form and email it, mail it, fax it or drop it off at 1401 East 7th Street in Charlotte. The instructions are on the form.

PRN’s peer support line is a 24/7 peer staffed phone line, offering confidential and emotional support, problem solve, and resources to North Carolina Residents.

Call:
1-855-PEERS NC (1-855-733-7762)

MeckHope is a collaborative initiative bringing urgent and preventive mental health and drug/alcohol-related services to Mecklenburg County residents. PRN partners with Anuvia, Mental Health Association of Central Carolinas, Smith Family Wellness, Thompson Child and Family Focus, Cardinal Innovations, and Mecklenburg County to bring various local resources and services to ensure access. PRN’s Support Line serves as a portal of entry for all MeckHOPE resources.

For more information about the MeckHOPE initiative and how you can receive support, click here.

PRN, in collaboration with Mecklenburg County, partner agencies, and grassroots organizations, finds housing, employment, and supports as well as resources including, but not limited to; MH/SA supports, Peer Support Services (PRN), Community Health Work (PRN), etc. This comprehensive approach addresses the social determinants of health for those who were formally at the “tent city” and is located at hotels within the community. 

PRN’s role is to provide individual Peer Support according to each person’s specific needs, Community Health workers who are there to help navigate resources within the community to ensure overall well-being and connection to the services needed.

Peer-run respites offer an alternative to going to an emergency department, in-patient mental health services, and/or involuntary commitment. They are non-forced, voluntary and non-locked healing environments. Peer-run respites offer peer support 24/7 and opportunities for individuals to explore recovery throughout their stay. Guests can stay for up to 10 days and still maintain their connections to family, community, work and school.

Outside, the respite space has gardens, water features, and patios. Inside, each guest has their own room with a small refrigerator and shared living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens and bathrooms. Supports, connection to resources, activities such as yoga, meditation, bicycling, etc., are also available for guests, but not mandatory.

If you are interested in learning more about the Respite, or to set up a time for an in-person or virtual tour, contact the Respite Team at (704) 390-7716

NC Statewide 24/7 Peer Warmline

Peer support is the foundation of PRN. Our 24/7 peer line is available to anyone in North Carolina that is seeking support, connection, problem solving, experiencing distress or a crisis situation.

We’re Here. 24/7. (And we’re good at listening.)

Call:
1-855-PEERS NC (1-855-733-7762)

 

Recovery Hub

PRN offers 50+ classes, support groups, and activities each month spanning the 8 Dimensions of Wellness.

  • Open access and no referral needed.
  • Virtual or in-person at our Hub: 1401 East 7th Street in Charlotte, NC.

We have classes for everyone! They may include: African Dance, substance use recovery, building your financial knowledge, writing for wellness, racial equity, or healing from trauma. Join us to connect with a recovery and healing community!

Click here for our monthly calendar,  class descriptions, and special events.

Join us to connect with a recovery and healing community. Narcan and other safe supplies available at no cost. 

Recovery Café CLT

A healing recovery community committed to serving people who have experienced trauma and the results of trauma like houselessness, substance use and mental health challenges, incarceration, and loneliness, by using a membership model to promote community belonging.

Learn more about Recovery Café CLT here.

Criminal Justice

Wellness, Recovery and FIRST Courts (ie. 5 Treatment Courts-Diversion)

PRN’s court-involved peer support team was previously incarcerated due to emotional distress, mental health and/or substance use. They are embedded within all legal and clinical staffing to introduce alternatives to incarceration, sanctioning and traditional treatments.

PRN court teams support individuals that are court involved to not simply satisfy court requirements, but to re-imagine long term recovery and healing. PRN also provides trainings on peer support, trauma, culture, recovery, 8 dimensions of wellness, etc., to treatment court teams, DA’s, probation, parole, treatment providers, and judges.

Employment Support

Individual Placement and Support

One of the most direct pathways to recovery is through employment and education. The disability narrative has kept our community in poverty without access to quality healthcare, dependence on subsidies, and with limited opportunities to build a personally satisfying life.

  • Do you want to work?
  • Do you want a job or career?
  • Do you want an education or your own business?

All are possible. Let’s talk. 



Interested? Just call our Help Desk at (704) 390-7709

Housing Support

PRN’s team of peer supporters who were formerly unhoused offer street outreach, support people with Shelter Plus Care (SPC) subsidies and are co-located in the men and women’s shelter. PRN’s team offers peer support, tenancy support and employment supports to help people without homes to choose, get, maintain a home and move toward homeownership. We do this by offering emotional support, access and connection to community resources, mentoring and skill development.

 

For individuals that have a SPC subsidy and are uninsured, PRN offers the “Plus Care” component with supports to identify landlords that will accept the subsidy, in their preferred community, with supports to choose their home, move in, keep their house, build their financial knowledge, and move from subsidized housing to their own home. Access to this program is through a referral from Shelter Plus Care.

Along with Mecklenburg County, the Roof Above, Anuvia, and Women’s Center of Hope, PRN offers peer support, tenancy support and employment supports to people that are currently at one of the community shelters, are experiencing emotional distress, mental health and/or substance use challenges, and are in need of a variety of resources to move out of the shelter into a home. PRN provides peer support by formerly unhoused Peer Specialists that have personally navigated community shelters and housing resources. They secured their own home and advanced their recovery. The role of the Peer Support Specialists in this initiative is similar to the roles within the SPC program. Shelter programs provide referrals for this initiative.

Are you living on the streets or staying at a shelter in Mecklenburg County? We have been unhoused too, and we’re here for you.

Whether you want to connect with someone that understands, want to find housing, become a homeowner, or are seeking a community to connect with, we are here.

Peer support is available at the shelters, on the streets, and at our Recovery Hub.

Integrated Care

Community Health Worker Initiative (CHW)

In partnership with Kepro, Mecklenburg County Health Department and NC DHHS, PRN built capacity for a team of Community Health Workers (CHW) to partner with our Peer Support Specialist team. The CHW initiative allows additional financial resources, navigation support and health education to our community of people impacted by COVID. This initiative builds on PRN’s work with Peer Voice NC to establish a specialty credential of Peer Support Specialists working in integrated care settings and advances our mission to increase access and coordination among each of the 8 Dimensions of Wellness (financial, physical, emotional, social, education, employment, environment/home, spiritual) and basic needs (food, housing, clothing, connection).

Innovations in Peer-Run Alternatives

PRN Incubator

PRN’s Founder and CEO knows the difficulties that accompany the start-up of a survivor-led organization or projects, and we support emerging leaders of people with lived experience through administrative support, shared health insurance, mentoring and or fiduciary support for grants and contracts.

PRN’s Incubator projects have included:

The Emerald School of Excellence (ESE) is NC’s first recovery high school, located in Charlotte. ESE offers students experiencing substance use challenges with the ability to receive peer support integrated with recovery supports, while pursuing their education in a tailored learnined environment. 

Recovery high schools nation-wide demonstrate that after substance use treatment, students who return to a traditional school have a 30% continued recovery, while those attending a recovery high school have a 70% continued recovery rate.

emeraldschool.org

NCDHHS, in support of capacity building for peer-run organizations, has contracted with PRN to serve as an incubator for two new Peer-Run Wellness Centers, GreenTree in Winston-Salem and No Wrong Door in western NC. PRN will work with the leadership of both organizations to build capacity for operations, program development, and sustainability. Modeled after PRN’s Recovery Hub, the PRWC model utilizes the fidelity to the FACIT.

Court and Diversion Support

Our peer support team knows firsthand the experience of going through the court system and being incarcerated. That’s why we are here for you to reimagine a life of recovery and healing while we introduce alternatives to incarceration, sanctioning, and traditional treatments into all legal and clinical staffings.

PRN provides training to treatment court teams, DA’s, probation, parole, providers, and judges on peer support, trauma, culture, recovery and wellness. We build the forensic peer support workforce through training and mentoring.

We also provide re-entry support and resources for those released from jail

Policy, Advocacy, and Social Justice

In partnership with Safe Justice for NC and Policy Analyst, Jarrod James, PRN has designed a non-police alternative model that blends community organizing, national examples from CAHOOTS (Oregon) and STAR (Denver), peer support, and recovery-alternatives to police intervention, use of involuntary commitment, confinement, segregation, restraint, and forced or coercive treatments. This team is driven by local community members that are committed to racial equity, safe communities, compassion and humane alternatives with people experiencing emotional distress (see attached recommendations).

PRN received a 3-year federal SAMHSA grant to incubate a statewide peer-led effort that mobilizes people with lived mental health and/or substance use recovery to impact legislation, policy, system and practice change. PVNC utilizes coalitions to elevate the influence of peer and recovery leaders and to build infrastructure needed for a strong peer and recovery movement.

Peervoicenc.org

1) Peer Justice Initiative (PJI)- formerly incarcerated Peer Support Specialists are organizing to create a NC specialty credential for forensic peer support, change policies to ensure that forensic peer supporters are utilized in all 5 intercepts of the criminal justice system from diversion to re-entry, and criminal justice reform efforts.

2) Recovery Alternative to Forced Treatment (RAFT)- people that have experienced involuntary and coercive treatment, allies and family members, have gathered 10 years of IVC data from 100 counties, demonstrating an 80% increase in the use of IVC in NC. The RAFT Coalition is advocating for alternatives to confinement and forced treatment through an array of peer-led community options.

3) PSS Expert Commission- peer support is effective if done with integrity and authenticity. NC does not currently have a certification, rather a certificate process, leading to lack of oversight of the profession. Leaders with lived experience and peer support joined with partners from NCDHHS, providers, and BHS Springboard to author recommendations for a peer-led board to provide oversight, credentialing and de-credentialing of the peer support profession including the draft of a NC statute.

4) Peer Support Coalition- this coalition established a White Paper and formal recommendations to align NC with best practices in peer support.

5) I’m IN Community Inclusion- a stakeholder coalition is established to advance the importance, funding, and policy related to inclusion as a critical ingredient to recovery. PVNC created the #MY5NC campaign to increase connection and reduce isolation during COVID.

6) PIPBHC Integrated Care- TA and training is being provided to 4 pilot sites in NC to establish integrated care settings, incorporating specialty peer support into the model. Lunch and learns and learning collaboratives are provided for workforce development and supervisory skills of non-peer supervisors.

7) Peer Wellness Center Pilot- this PVNC coalition established a model for Peer Wellness Centers to be piloted in NC with a defined model, outcomes and fidelity.

Important Links:
Peer Voice NC Facebook
Peer Voice NC Survey
Peer Voice NC YouTube

Training, Technical Assistance, and Consultation

PRN provides technical assistance, mentoring and training to managed care organizations, service providers, and peer-run organizations as they seek effective, trauma informed, recovery-oriented systems, practice and organizational change.  

PRN’s Peer Academy has invested in the peer workforce for 16 years and its Recovery University has been training the provider workforce for nearly 20 years. 

PRN is the incubator for NC’s only consumer voice network, Peer Voice NC, which centers the earned wisdom of lived experience to influence policy change and social justice.

Peer Academy is PRN’s 40-hour NC approved curricula to train future Peer Support Specialists and prepare them to understand and operate in their role with authenticity to the history of the C/S/X movement and values related to mutuality. Elective classes are offered through Peer Academy as well for continuing education.

With much focus on the role of trauma in emotional distress and labels of mental illness and substance use challenges, service providers and systems are challenged to create organizational cultures, environments, services, processes and procedures that recognize the impact of trauma, foster resilience and resist unintentional re-traumatization of people supported. As a trauma-informed organization that also spent 2 years immersed in trauma informed organizational change, PRN’s CEO offers training, TA and support to cohorts of executive leaders and managers considering trauma-informed organizational change.

Understanding recovery practices, principles, research, tools and the history of the recovery movement is critical to fostering recovery in practice. Recovery University uses a combination of didactic and experiential content for the development of recovery practices for individual practitioners or teams.

When offered with fidelity, IPS demonstrates the highest rates of competitive employment. PRN started NC’s first technical assistance centers for IPS SE and operates a high fidelity IPS team. Whether you are interested in learning about the model and what makes it unique or want your team trained in IPS, we’re here to support your organization to embrace competitive employment as among the most effective paths to recovery!

Ideally, programs that employ Peer Support Specialists are supervised by peer supervisors. However, many programs utilize non-peer supervisors with little exposure to the role/scope/competencies of authentic peer support, integrating PSS into the workforce, supervising the roles within their scope of practice, and how to interview, employ and retain and high quality PSS team. Through PRN’s 16 years of experience operating programs staffed by Peer Support Specialists, our team has a lot of “lessons learned” and have translated that into trainings, learning collaboratives and technical assistance for supervisors, teams and/or organizations.

  • Is your agency “ready” to effectively offer peer support?
  • Are you offering peer support but not sure if you’re doing it well? Let us know how we can help!

In partnership with UNC Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health, we offer a 3 day virtual training to meet the NC requirement for CST. The training includes a Recovery foundation, principles of Housing First and supportive housing, tenancy support, an overview of subsidies and the use of various tools to support people to find, choose, get, and keep a home after experiencing homelessness.

For more information, contact Cherene Caraco: ccaraco@promiseresourcenetwork.org.

Retreat @ The Plaza Respite

Retreat@ The Plaza offers a safe, healing space to connect with others who have been through significant emotional distress and crises.  As a guest, you will have your own private bedroom, space to breathe, talk, create, and perhaps explore new ways of understanding your experiences without going to a locked facility or hospital.

Retreat@ The Plaza is free.  You are welcome to stay for a week and maintain connections to work, family, school, or other important things in your life or to take a break from those things and be surrounded by support, healing, creativity, and love.  Come for a tour or call us to learn more.

Click here to learn more about Retreat @ The Plaza.

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Warmline

833-390-7728

Hub Hours

Monday – Thursday

8:30 am – 4:00 pm

Friday
10:00 am – 4:00 pm

Saturday – Sunday

CLOSED

Office

704-390-7709

Address

1401 East 7th Street
Charlotte, NC 28204

NC Peer Support Warmline

1-855-733-7762
1-855-PEERS NC

Respite

704-390-7716

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