Peer support sponsorship

Peer support — trained people with their own lived experience supporting others — is what this sector does that clinical services do not, and it has a real per-person cost that almost nobody presents as sponsorable.

Units that work

• A peer supporter's training and certification
• A year of a peer support group — venue, refreshments, facilitation, materials
• A peer supporter's supervision for a year, which is the part that gets cut first
• A helpline or warmline shift, or a month of them
• A month of one-to-one peer support for one person
• A school or workplace programme delivered to one group

The supervision unit is worth listing precisely because it is unglamorous. Peer supporters need supervision to work safely and it is the line that gets trimmed when budgets tighten — a donor funding it is funding the thing that keeps the programme safe.

What a sponsor receives

• Yes: the knowledge that the training, group or shift was funded
• Yes: aggregate reporting — how many supporters trained, how many group sessions ran, how many contacts a shift handles
• Yes: recognition and a description of how the programme works
• No: the identity of any peer supporter or any person supported
• No: attendance at a group, or observation of any session
• No: reporting on a specific person's progress, however anonymised

Put those on the item page. A sponsor who assumed some connection to an individual and learns otherwise afterwards feels short-changed by something you were always going to do.

Protect the peer supporters

This is the constraint specific to this item and it is easy to miss. A peer supporter is, by definition, somebody with lived experience of mental illness who is now working for the organization.

• Do not name or photograph peer supporters in fundraising material without their own specific consent — their role discloses something about them
• Do not ask them to tell their story to raise money; if they offer, apply the same care as any other disclosure, and more, because you are their employer
• Do not have a sponsor introduced to "the peer supporter you funded"
• Where a peer supporter wants to speak about the programme in general, that is a different and much safer thing

The asymmetry is real: an employee with lived experience asked by their employer to disclose it publicly is not in a free position, and the request should not be made.

Report in programme terms

"Your sponsorship trained two peer supporters and funded a year of the Tuesday group" is specific, verifiable and identifies nobody. Add what the programme does and how it is supervised — most donors have never heard of peer support and find it genuinely interesting once explained.

Offer several

Training places and group-years are not scarce; the waiting list is. Offer multiple units at different levels so bidders at every level fund something real, and say how many people are currently waiting — that number is the argument.

General information, not clinical, legal or safeguarding advice for your organization. Disclosure, confidentiality and crisis-response obligations are fact-specific — your clinical leadership and counsel decide how any of this applies.