Community Potential’s first Information & Insights brief, From Lived Experience to System Impact: Integrating Peer Support into Health and Social Services, explores the growing role of peer support workers and the value that lived and living experience can bring to health and social service systems.
The paper looks at how peer support can strengthen trust, engagement, service navigation, and client-led care, while also considering the organizational conditions needed for peer workers to be supported and successfully integrated into practice. It highlights impacts not only for people accessing services, but also for peer workers themselves and for the broader systems in which they work.
The brief is grounded in both research and local experience, featuring insights from Positive Living Niagara and Talia Storm, Director of StreetWorks Services. Through Positive Living Niagara’s experience with peer support (including its Safer Harm Reduction Practices (SHaRP) program), Talia brings an important Niagara perspective to the opportunities, realities, and challenges of embedding lived experience meaningfully within services.
CLICK HERE to access the brief!
These briefs will be released regularly through the NKE, with insights also helping to inform Living in Niagara 2026; we invite you to share ideas for future topics at hello@communitypotential.ca
