Caregiver Peer Ambassador Scheme
Introduction
Caregiver Peer Ambassador Scheme is designed to train the caregivers with caring experience for persons with mental illness to become peer ambassadors,providing voluntary peer support services to other families in ways of mutual support. One can always grow in adversity and shine with love no matter how worse the environment is. Caregiver Peer Ambassadors are committed to sharing their own experience with mission and love, willing to become blessing for others and inspiring others through own life.
Objectives
Through the Project, every participant will:
- become our partners in helping new families in dealing with caring challenges
- transform his/her role as family members to supporters and re-establish new personal life
- cultivate team spirit with helping hands
Process
Training lasts for around 7 months and is divided into 3 stages:
Stage 1: Training courses
Stage 2: Internship
Stage 3: Assessment
After appraisal, members will officially become Caregiver Peer Ambassadors and participate in voluntary work. Certificates (gold, silver or bronze) will be issued according to their service hours and attendance to training courses.
Training Courses
The Course is divided into four units with four sessions:
Personal Growth
– to explore personal strengths, understand themselves and own personalities by Enneagram and thus improving or achieving self-breakthrough.
Recovery Experience –
to learn the concept of recovery, arrange their experience into sharing stories and practice group sharing skills with the recovery concept, , cultivate skills and attitudes in helping their family members to recover.
Individual Care –
to learn peer counselling skills, practice empathy and communication skills, including listening, responding and setting up boundaries.
Media Interview –to learn how to prepare for media interviews.
Internship
Training courses will be followed by internship. Each participant can choose to participate in any one of the following three sessions according to their own preferences or strengths.
Individual Care –
one-on-one pairing for sharing and caring new families.
Recovery Experience Sharing –
sharing on their own experiences with recovered family members in different groups and programmes at center service.
Media Interview –
meeting media or participating in public talks to share their stories, for example, stress and challenges at the care giving role, ways to overcome.
Service Scopes
After internship, participants will officially become Caregiver Peer Ambassador upon appraisal. The Ambassadors can apply for the post as an employed caregiver peer support worker in the centre or continue to serve as a volunteer while certificates (gold, silver or bronze) will be issued according to the service hours and attendance of training courses.
Service scopes cover:
Individual Care –
one-on-one pairing for sharing and caring new families.
Recovery Experience Sharing –
sharing on their own experiences with recovered family members in different groups and programmes at center service.
Media Interview –
meeting media or participating in public talks to share their stories, for example, stress and challenges at the care giving role, ways to overcome.
Over the past year, our Ambassadors received invitations from different social service organisations, hospitals and tertiary institutions to share with the families members with persion with history of mental illness and the public. Moreover, some Ambassadors were interviewed by media (including radio and newspapers).
Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in the sharing by our Caregiver Peer Ambassadors. Invitation on sharing sessions are most welcome.