Team-based approaches have been shown to support better behavioral health outcomes for the people served — as well as those providing care — while also reducing costs. The Health Fund’s Behavioral Health Initiative supports new and innovative team-based projects as a core priority within our grantmaking strategy.
Increasingly, peer support professionals fill an important role within provider teams. Peers deliver critical services informed by their own valuable lived experience — including coaching, education, outreach, and assistance in navigating the complexity of behavioral health services. Peers also help fight stigma by fostering open communication with individuals who can benefit from behavioral health services, as well as promoting broader community support.
Many Health Fund grantees have deployed peer support and expertise in clinical and community settings to help increase access to behavioral health services. A few examples:
Catholic Human Services
The Health Fund has awarded a pair of grants in 2017 and 2021 to Catholic Human Services (CHS) in Alpena and surrounding counties, which has developed two programs to provide innovative responses to families impacted by substance use disorder.
The Family Recovery Care Team program, established in 2017, utilizes a care coordination model, a case manager and a team-based process with MDHHS, CMH and the courts, to work with families in the child welfare system due to addiction.
The Family Recovery Coach program, developed in 2021, deploys peer coaches to work with families and adolescents impacted by substance use disorder. As part of a team-based model of substance use disorder care, family recovery coaches help individuals and families understand addiction as a chronic, recurring medical condition, find pathways to recovery, and connect with services that can support them based on their needs.
Since receiving Health Fund grants, the programs have impacted hundreds of families across a seven-county region of northeast Michigan. Additionally, CHS has developed partnerships with MyMichigan Medical Centers in Alpena, Tawas and West Branch to integrate recovery coaches into emergency care settings. CHS has also developed peer recovery coach supports in the community and in criminal justice settings.
The many benefits that CHS reports from the recovery coach model include a reduction of stigma and stronger community awareness of addiction and resources for recovery. Coaches are engaged across medical systems, court systems, and communities, involved in coalitions, engaged in the recovery community, and modeling for others what a healthy life in recovery can look like.
Western Upper Peninsula Health Department
Meanwhile, our partners at the Western UP Health Department used a 2020 grant to employ a peer recovery coach to work directly with women in recovery from substance use disorders (SUD).
The program — Positive Steps Together — was initially designed to focus on screening and early intervention for SUD services but pivoted during the pandemic to offer direct supports and services through strategic partnerships with local treatment courts, county jails, and other institutions. Positive Steps Together successfully engaged a high number of women through a combination of jail-based and community-based support programs.
The peer recovery coach was an essential partner in the process: building trusted relationships with the women served, co-facilitating support groups with a certified counselor, meeting regularly with participants, attending court sessions, conducting outreach to medical providers, providing referrals to services, and more.
Ultimately, Positive Steps Together more than doubled the initial target number of individuals served during a two-year grant period and provided comprehensive, ongoing support.
Since the end of the grant period, the Department has hired two additional peer recovery coaches and an SUD counselor, expanded to include services for men, and grown the initiative to become a CARF-accredited SUD treatment program.
A powerful resource
These projects show why we need to systematically develop more clinical and community care teams that include peers. Their unique expertise — rooted in lived experience — enables peers to cultivate relationships with individuals built on trust.
Peer professionals can be instrumental in making behavioral health service delivery systems more effective. Our systems, in turn, should continue to evolve to increase access to behavioral health services in part by promoting the use of peers.
Our 2025 Behavioral Health Initiative is now open. Team-based approaches — including programs employing peer professionals — will continue to be an important priority. Visit our Behavioral Health page for updates and to view our RFP.