These two sources push past the "practice guidelines" framing (see Peer_Support_Practice.md) into the political/theoretical roots of peer support — useful for a coach who wants to understand why the field exists in the form it does, not just its rules.

Peer Support as a Tool for Community Care

Source: Training Development Resources/Peer Support Philosophies — Shinjini Bakshi, Columbia Social Work Review, "Peer Support as a Tool for Community Care: 'Nothing About Us, Without Us'"

Argues that frontline/marginalized communities reclaim power by harnessing peer wisdom, situating peer support within an anti-carceral, abolitionist frame in social work rather than treating it as an add-on to clinical care. Central claim: expanded access to anti-carceral peer support (formal and informal) functions as a mental-health safety net that interrupts harm and centers agency, consent, and self-determination — and the field of social work is invited to center Black liberation and community care in how it integrates peer support into policy and practice.

We Keep Us Safe: Building Peer Support Collectives from a Disability Justice Lens

Source: Training Development Resources/Peer Support Philosophies — Dustin Gibson & Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu (Project LETS), teach-in slide deck

Baseline values stated up front: access is a practice; no one has "expertise," only offerings; lead with identity-first language; abolition must include all cages and sites of confinement; use content warnings; sit with discomfort.

Disability Justice principles (10 named, useful as a checklist for evaluating a program's actual values, not just its stated ones): intersectionality; leadership of the most impacted; anti-capitalist politic; cross-movement organizing; recognizing wholeness; sustainability; cross-disability solidarity; interdependence; collective access; collective liberation.

Ableism, defined and located at four levels — genuinely useful framework for staff training: the belief some bodies/minds are worth more based on productivity under capitalism, showing up ideologically (e.g., "psychosis has nothing to do with spirituality"), institutionally (compulsory treatment, responding to crisis with police, mandated reporting), interpersonally (stigma, gaslighting, exclusion), and internalized ("I am a burden," "I'll never be capable of X").

The "carceral helping cycle" vs. the peer-support alternative, laid out as parallel loops:

• Carceral cycle: person struggles in isolation → told to "just reach out" → scared of what happens if they do → reaches out, or someone decides for them without consent → autonomy is stripped, they're institutionalized or forced into a treatment plan → trust is broken.
• Way out: person reaches out and is met with accessible, anti-racist, non-carceral, peer-led crisis and long-term support; if other support is wanted, the peer supporter helps connect them to therapists, psychiatrists, or peer respite centers on their own terms.

Why people might prefer peer support over clinical support (worth knowing verbatim for talking with a skeptical funder or partner org): valuing shared lived experience; a non-pathologizing space not centered on symptoms; equal partnership without being labeled patient/client; room to explore a self-diagnosis together; flexibility in time and structure; and — bluntly — feeling safer with someone who isn't accountable to "the system."

A necessary caution from the source, in a directly quoted line: "Just because someone is Disabled, neurodivergent, or has 'lived experience' doesn't mean they have an anti-oppression and liberation-based analysis... What really matters is experience and shared values." Lived experience alone doesn't guarantee good support — worth building into supervision/training rather than assuming shared identity is sufficient.

Practical crisis-response concepts: pod mapping (identifying specific people in someone's life who can show up during a crisis, for organizing ongoing care, not just a single emergency contact); peer respite centers (only ~13 exist in the US, but shown to reduce need for psychiatric hospitalization, and are peer-led); "soft holds" (rotating shifts of people who come stay with someone who doesn't feel safe alone) as an alternative to institutional response.