Resource Library

Local leaders working toward goals as diverse as reducing jail use, addressing behavioral health needs, and reducing homelessness may want to consider utilizing a promising group: peer support workers. This introductory resource brief highlights some of the policy and funding opportunities city and county leaders can explore to build on the success of early examples of communities that have utilized peer support as part of their continuum of care and in justice related interventions

The purpose of this introductory training is to provide HIV clinicians (including, but not limited to physicians, dentists, nurses, and other allied medical staff, therapists and social workers, and counselors, specialists, and case managers) with a detailed overview of cocaine, methamphetamine, and HIV.

Stimulants and HIV PowerPoint Presentation

Stimulants and HIV Trainer Guide

Stimulants and HIV Fact Sheet

Video File #1 – Dopamine - Normal

Video File #2 – Dopamine - Cocaine

Video File #3 – Dopamine - Methamphetamine

Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated intervention of individual organizations. Large-scale social change comes from better cross-sector coordination rather than from the isolated intervention of individual organizations. Evidence of the effectiveness of this approach is still limited, but examples discussed in this article suggest that substantially greater progress could be made in alleviating many of our most serious and complex social problems if nonprofits, governments, businesses, and the public were brought together around a common agenda to create collective impact.

Colorado has a strategic plan to reorient systems, clinical care, and communities to promote recovery. Recovery is a process of change through which people improve their health and wellness, live self-directed lives, and strive to reach their full potential.

The plan, published by Colorado Health Institute, makes clear that recovery happens in communities. Clinical treatment can provide a bridge to recovery, but an individual’s recovery is supported by safe and stable housing, having a meaningful work or another daily activity, and good mental health and physical well-being.

The Recovery Advisory Committee – with input from hundreds of recovery experts, people in recovery and other communities’ members statewide – outlined a vision for Colorado’s future recovery-oriented system of care. The four critical building blocks include:

Whole-person approach to recovery
Integrating community voices
A recovery-oriented system of care
Best practices for promoting recovery

Millions of people use the Community Tool Box each year to get help taking action, teaching, and training others in organizing for community development. Dive in to find help assessing community needs and resources, addressing social determinants of health, engaging stakeholders, action planning, building leadership, improving cultural competency, planning an evaluation, and sustaining your efforts over time.

Workbook on understanding compassion fatigue among people who work in the behavioral health field.

From The Florida Certification Board and Florida Department of Children and Families, this is a compiled list of self-paced training resources for Recovery Peer Specialists and Recovery Support Specialists.

This new consumer guide offers people with past or current problematic substance use a straightforward exploration of the roles, values, and work environments of professional peer specialists. This guide is a comprehensive resource that will help readers understand who professional peer specialists are, what they do in various work settings, and how to access and pay for their services. Through visual aids illustrating the integration of peer specialists into the treatment and recovery landscape and practical forms readers can fill out, this consumer guide will help facilitate a strong start toward collaboration with a peer specialist.

Peer workers and peer recovery support services have become increasingly central to people’s ability to live with or recover from mental and/or substance use disorders. Community-based organizations led by peer workers also play a growing role in helping people find recovery. Both mental health consumers and people in recovery from substance use disorders have recognized the need for core competencies, and both communities actively participated in developing these core competencies for peer support workers.
Core competencies are the capacity to easily perform a role or function. They are often described as clusters of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes a person needs to have to successfully perform a role or job. Training, mentoring, and supervision can help people develop core competencies.

The 2022 National Drug Control Strategy (PDF | 2.6 MB) (NDCS) includes, among other efforts, one activity to expand the substance use disorder (SUD) health professions workforce through development of a core curriculum on SUD. The curriculum is for all medical and health professions programs so that every student is educated early in their academic careers on SUD and has basic knowledge of strategies to identify, assess, intervene, and treat addiction, as well as support recovery.

The goal of the Learning Agenda toolkit is to facilitate deeper, more robust stages of learning that can increasingly impact systems change.

The Learning Agenda was developed by the Public Health Learning Network, a national consortium of ten Regional Public Health Training Centers (PHTCs), and their partners, that provide high-quality, relevant training to address the learning needs of the public health workforce.

In September 2018, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) contracted with the Human Services Research Institute to conduct a study of licensing and credentialing policies for SUD treatment providers across the 50 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.) and to examine billing eligibility and reimbursement for SUD treatment services across Medicaid, Medicare, and commercial insurance plans. The purpose of the project is to examine state variation in policies and to investigate the barriers to and facilitators of increased treatment capacity and insurance reimbursement for SUD providers across the nation.
SUD treatment services are provided by a broad range of practitioners, including physicians, nurses, behavioral health counselors, social workers, psychologists, and many others.

This study focuses on the SUD counselor segment of the workforce, as this segment is particularly impacted by licensing, credentialing, and reimbursement barriers due to the lack of standardization on qualifications and credentials.