Certified Peer Support Youth

Clinician I – Certified Peer Support Youth

Children's Services

The Certified Peer Support—Youth (CPS-Y) role is to provide intentional, authentic support to youth consumers with emotional, physical, behavioral, and/or mental health challenges. The skilled unrelenting focus of the CPS-Y is using his/her life experience with a serious emotion disturbance and specialize training to promote recovery and resiliency.

• Provide authentic and purposeful support to promote youth and family recovery
• The services are geared toward promoting self-empowerment of the youth, enhancing community living skills, and developing/enhancing natural supports.
• Provide resources and educational materials to help assist youth with understanding services, options, and treatment expectations, as well assistance with developing wellness tools and coping skills.
• Facilitating and creating advocacy, balance, and cohesion between the youth/family served, professionals (including CPS-Ps who may be supporting the family), and other supporting partners.
• Deliver intentional support activities that build on the strengths and resiliency traits of parent/primary caregiver
• Collaborate with agency staff internally and representatives from community-based organizations and child-serving systems in providing support to families receiving service

• Peer-based relationships:
  Must be able to introduce yourself to the consumer and community partners and explain your role as a CPS-Y.
• Ability to establish peer-based relationships by using strategic self-disclosure to build connection based on understanding the consumer's experience.
• Ability to build a strong sense of connection based in equality, common respect, and mutuality.
• Ability to demonstrate active listening skills, empathetic responses and validate the youth's experience.
• Must be able to use person-first and strength-based language in every interaction with consumer and those working with the consumer.

• Ability to create conditions for youth to make decisions that are best for their life and determine their course of action.
• Ability to estimate right fit and match of support and follow through on a varied range of support activities.
• Support others to understand and appreciate the youth's positions.
• Understand the youth's position, interests and preferences and actively support them.

• Continually work to ensure the youth feels empowered and confident in their own decision-making ability.
• Ability to extract functional strengths from the consumer's story and share them with family and other team members.
• Ability to actively accept youth's decisions and communicate a sense of acceptance even when you disagree.
• Ability to manage personal bias and disagreement so it does not interfere with the support relationship.

• Ability to communicate a sense of respect that youth's voice matters and deserves to be heard.
• Ability to identify, extract and utilize the youth's functional strengths and family culture to develop individualized support plans.
• Ability to communicate a sense of cultural humility in connecting with each consumer.
• Ability to identify unmet needs as a key to establishing understanding.
• Ability to assist youths in reflecting on their own journey and encourage empowerment.
• Ability to model a relational stance of respect and acceptance in all interactions with and about youths.