Intentional Peer Support

IPS Team Mission Statement:

The IPS team aims to decrease dependency upon services, incidents of severe unwellness and hospitalisation, to promote autonomy, increase daily life function and the ability to find joy.

What is Intentional Peer Support?

Intentional Peer Support (IPS) is a way of providing support based on shared lived experience and genuine human connection.

It builds upon the foundation of traditional peer support where people support each other and use their own lived experiences to create understanding and collectively build a transformational relationship where healing and holistic wellbeing can grow and thrive.

It emphasises mutual learning, shared power, and responsibility, not working “for” but “with”. Walking alongside and assisting you at your pace to identify and overcome obstacles and achieve goals, while ensuring you remain the lead agent of change in your own wellbeing journey.

Our trained dedicated team of Intentional Peer Support kaimahi, aim to find understanding and meaning within your own unique world view, helping you to make sense of your life experiences, find strength and purpose, seek out possibilities for hope, potential, and a more fulfilled, grounded and balanced life.

What IPS is:

  • Recovery based (seeks wellness and recovery).
  • Works from the core foundation of the shared lived experience.
  • Based on honesty and openness.
  • Supportive, mutual and collaborative.
  • Respectful, caring and patient.
  • Strength focused and relationship centred.
  • Potential orientated (works towards goals and opportunities).
  • Long or short term and can be provided one-on-one and /or via groups.
  • Provides knowledge, tools, skills and advocacy.
  • Professional with appropriate boundaries.
  • Supportive of personal choice, autonomy, self-responsibility and self-direction.