About Us
At Nurture Network, our mission is to humanise and take the stigma out of mental health care by leveraging the power of lived experience. We are a community-driven organization dedicated to providing compassionate, effective, and innovative mental health services. Our unique approach is grounded in the real-life experiences of our team, ensuring that every individual who seeks our help is met with empathy, understanding, and personalized care. We believe that by nurturing one another, we can build a stronger, healthier, and more resilient community. Together, we strive to make mental health support accessible to all, fostering a network of hope, recovery, and empowerment.
All of our staff have trained in Intentional Peer Support (IPS) and use this as the foundation of their practice.
What is Peer Support Work?
There is no one, universally accepted definition of peer support. Sherry Mead offers the following:
"Peer support is a system of giving and receiving help founded on key principles of respect, shared responsibility, and mutual agreement of what is helpful. Peer support is not based on psychiatric models and diagnostic criteria. It is about understanding another’s situation empathically through the shared experience of emotional and psychological pain. When people find affiliation with others they feel are 'like' them, they feel a connection. This connection, or affiliation, is a deep, holistic understanding based on mutual experience where people are able to 'be' with each other without the constraints of traditional (expert/patient) relationships." (Mead, 2001).
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At the core of peer work in all of it's different forms is the type of knowledge that peer support workers base the foundations of their practice in and that is their own lived experience. Through training, this lived experience is then used intentionally by the peer worker to form a therapeutic relationship that is based on these shared experiences founded in the values of mutuality, empathy, respect and collaboration. These shared life experiences allow a level of understanding that can not be learnt through education and creates an atmosphere that is free of judgment and criticism where recovery becomes possible.