Queer Intentional Peer Support 5-day Core Training - March 2025

Join your trainers, Calvin Moen, Sean Donovan and Cindy Hadge, for this 5-day Core Intentional Peer Support (IPS) training adapted specifically to center queer communities. Intentional Peer Support provides a powerful framework for creating transformative relationships where both people learn and grow together. IPS is used across the world in community, peer support, and human services settings, and is a tool for community development with broad appeal to people from all walks of life.

During the Core Training, participants learn to:

• Seek ways to connect, become aware of disconnects, and work to reconnect
• Explore how we have "come to know what we know"
• Strive for mutuality in relationships
• Stay curious, question assumptions and own judgements and opinions
• Open up new ways of listening
• Use experience to relate and build trust
• Name and negotiate power in relationships
• Approach crisis as an opportunity to grow
• Focus on the quality of relationships instead of fixing one another
• Share risk and responsibility
• Pay attention to the impact of clinical and labeling language
• Understand how trauma affects lives
• Keep the energy in relationships moving towards what we want
• Understand peer support in the context of social change and social justice

You can learn more about Intentional Peer Support at www.intentionalpeersupport.org.

This training will take place in-person beginning Monday, March 3 at 9am and running through Friday, March 7 at 5pm.

All five training days will run from 9AM to 5PM with a full hour for lunch. Coffee and tea will be provided. Admission price does not include lodging or meals.

PLEASE NOTE: Space is very limited in this training as we anticipate the majority of spots will go to our new Anemoni peer respite team.

IMPORTANT LOCATION INFORMATION: Four of five days will take place at the Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke. However, Wednesday, March 5 will take place at the Holyoke Library on Chestnut Street.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, 100 Bigelow Street, Holyoke, United States