CAFE TA Center Trainings
The CAFÉ TA Center is committed to providing quality training to consumers and advocates throughout the country. Consumers in the community need the right knowledge and tools to effectively organize, speak for themselves, and thrive in their daily lives. Thanks to the technology available, it has become relatively easy to connect with consumers and advocates and share resources without having to ask people to interrupt their daily routines by traveling to attend training.
The CAFÉ TA Center will take advantage of that technology by hosting a series of trainings online. Those who miss trainings, or wish to view them after the fact, will be able to find all of our past trainings here in the Training section of our website.
Training topics will include workforce development, supported education, transition, leadership, organizational development, sustainability, and more. If you think there’s a subject that needs to be addressed through a training, please contact us to let us know!
Supports for Families Workshop Series
This interactive workshop series has been designed to help family members and caregivers of people with serious mental health conditions support their family member by promoting recovery and taking a strengths-based approach to encouraging resiliency and self-direction.
The workshop series includes both a series of videos and a corresponding workbook. There are five modules in the series, with each one having its own video and a section in the workbook that goes with it. Each module is hosted on its own webpage where you can view both the relevant workbook section and its related video.
Find the Supports for Families Workshop Series on our website here!
The Consumer Pathways to Inclusion and Engagement Model
This CPEIM is a guide book created by peers, for peers, to help them develop the skills they need to turn their lived mental health experience into meaningful change in the mental health system of care.
It’s designed to :
- help people in recovery use their voice to help others walking the same path;
- enable them to better understand themselves and their recovery; and
- use that understanding to foster systems change and the growth of person‐centered, strengths‐based, recovery-focused approaches to the mental health system in their states and communities.
The CPIEM is a robust document made up of multiple modules with a variety of resources that peers can use in finding their own path from lived experience to active advocacy!
Find the CPIEM on our website here!
You can also view the recording of an introductory webinar about the CPIEM here.
Recent Trainings and Webinars
This section includes links to articles about recent trainings and webinars here on our website. Each article includes a link to the relevant recording.
- Integrating Mindfulness Practices in the Workplace: A Four-Part Series – This new series from CAFE TAC is designed to help individuals with mental health conditions thrive in the workforce, and support employers in creating a wellness-focused organization, by introducing mindfulness tools to boost the well-being and resilience of employees.
- Family Mental Health: Navigating the Holidays – While the holidays are a time of celebration and connection, they can also bring about challenges. This webinar will help you navigate the season with a bit more preparedness and a bit less stress. Learn strategies to make this time more manageable and enjoyable for you and your family.
- Supporting Young Adults and Ourselves: Understanding and Supporting Adult Children in Transition – Are you a parent, family member, or caregiver of a young person with a mental health challenge navigating the exciting yet challenging phase of transition to independence? View the recording of this 90-minute webinar where we offer insights, emotional support, and strategies to help you thrive during this transformative journey.
- Embracing Your Own Path and Recovery While Supporting Family Members in Theirs – Are you a caregiver navigating the complexities of supporting your family member’s recovery journey? Look no further! Check out this enlightening CAFÉ TA Center webinar and interactive conversation about family mental health that explores how every family member has their own journey, and can support one another now matter where they are with their own recovery.
- Rapid-Fire Recovery Q&A with our friend Cherene Caraco – In this the final installment in the year-long “Advancing Recovery in Your Community Series” CAFE TAC opened the floor to take questions from attendees for our series facilitator, peer leader, advocate, and CEO of North Carolina’s Promise Resource Network Cherene Caraco, resulting in a wide-ranging conversation about peer support, recovery, and systems change.
- CAFE TAC and AMPSS Present: Mike and Meg Starring in The CPIEM – Get an introduction to The Consumer Pathways to Inclusion and Engagement Model guidebook in this webinar featuring a conversation with panelists that developed this new resource created by peers, for peers, to help them develop the skills they need to turn their lived mental health experience into meaningful change in the mental health system of care.
- Beyond Peer Support: Peer Leaders Inspiring Systems-Level Change – This webinar features a conversation among peers that work in systems-level roles helping to expand the scope and reach of peer support and recovery. Find out what making change at the system level looks like, hear about the paths others have taken to get there, and imagine the leadership path you can take to bring change to your community!
- Wisdom from The Streets: Unhoused, Criminalized, and Hospitalized – This webinar includes the perspectives of three people that lived on the streets with labels like “felon,” “addict,” “homeless,” and “schizophrenic,” and now work to reclaim the narrative around being unhoused through street outreach, policy change, and challenging the status quo sharing their thoughts on what they needed and what the system provided, the role of treatment, both voluntary and mandatory, and their ideas about solutions.
- Strengthening Families in Times of Perceived Crisis – This webinar featured a a conversation on supporting loved ones in mental health crisis, discussing strategies for resilience and actionable strategies to navigate the complexities of supporting someone you care about.
- Hearing Voices Network: De-mystifying Voices and Visions – This webinar features a discussion of the Hearing Voices Network and their unique approach to the experience of voice hearing that seeks to demystify the experience, offer information, education, and support to understand voice hearing and visions, promote recovery rather than pathology, and challenge negative stereotypes, biases, and stigma.
- Alternatives to Suicide: A Harm Reduction Approach – This webinar features four experts versed in Alternatives to Suicide discussing alternative approaches to suicide driven by genuine openness, recovery values, and authentic peer connection.
- Managing Trauma and Distress: Navigating Your Role as You Support Your Loved One’s Mental Health Challenges – In this webinar, two family peer supports discuss the signs of caregiver PTSD, explore the connections between past traumas and caregiving, and share how to use past experiences to build strength and promote healing.
- Human Rights Approaches to Mental Health – This webinar features four panelists discussing what it means to bring a human rights framework to mental health, and how doing so can help reveal where our existing system of care and human rights considerations come into conflict, and the type of reality we might experience if human rights were the foundation for approaches to support, recovery, and community inclusion.
- Peer-Run Warmlines and 988: Do We Really Need Both? – This webinar features three expert panelists discussing the current state of the crisis line and peer-run warmline landscape, contrasting the differences between peer-run warmlines and 988, and discussing how these two systems relate to each other.
- Family Mental Health: Tips, Strategies, and a Great New Resource – View this webinar to learn about key concepts in helping to support the recovery of a family member with a mental health condition while also maintaining your own wellness as a caregiver, and find out about the tools available through CAFE TAC’s “Supports for Families Workshop Series.”
- Peer-Operated Respites: Is It Time for National Standards? – This webinar included a panel of four experts discussing the values that make peer respite unique, and the challenges that come with bringing this vital innovative service to scale.
- The Soteria Experience: Home, not Hospital – This webinar, which featured four guest speakers with extensive experience working with the Soteria model, shared the history of Soteria houses, an alternative recovery path for people with serious mental health conditions.
- Recovery Cafés: Creating Communities of Healing – This webinar introduces the Recovery Café model and provides a platform for two experts to share how Recovery Cafés can support recovery, build community, and counter isolation.
- Experts by Experience: Paving the Way for Forensic Peer Support – This webinar provides a platform for four experts with lived experience to discuss peer support for people in the justice system, unique challenges and opportunities in the forensic space, and strategies to change minds and grow this essential peer support discipline.
- Recovery High Schools: Fostering Resilience and Healing – This webinar examines the role of Recovery High Schools in supporting the mental health and wellbeing of transition-age youth through a conversation with the Executive Director of a Recovery HS and three of their students.
- Master Your Personal Narrative: Storytelling As A Leadership Tool – This six-part webinar series broadens the idea of the personal recovery narrative and discusses how you can use your story as a leadership tool in different contexts, including advocacy, executive/organizational leadership, and agency-level systems change.
- So You’re Ready to Work, Now What? – This 12-part interactive employment training series is designed to address challenges people with mental health conditions face in finding and maintaining employment by equipping attendees with the skills and strategies they need to find and maintain employment.
- Peer-Run Crisis Alternatives: Warm Lines, Respites, Wellness Centers, Community Response Teams, and PAD’s – This webinar and Learning Community series presents an overview of five peer- and recovery-centered crisis alternatives: peer-operated warm lines, peer respites, peer-run wellness centers, community response teams, and the use of psychiatric advance directives (PAD’s).
- Exploring an Important Intersection within The Systems of Care: Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and Mental Health Disabilities – This webinar and Learning Community series explores the intersection of psychiatric disabilities and intellectual or developmental disabilities, including common experiences and priorities, and ways to develop a shared vision of person-centered systems of care.
- Family Mental Health Learning Community – This Learning Community includes conversation about how instead of unsuccessfully trying to get a family member in distress to engage in treatment, blaming themselves, and feeling guilty, families can empower their family members to find the recovery path that works for them, provide support that meets their needs, and make life better for everyone involved.
- Integrated Care, Integrating Peer Support – This webinar shares information about integrated care models that incorporate medical health and mental health services with a focus on peer support as an integral component.
- What’s this Recovery, Wellness and Well-Being Thing? How to Support Yourself and Your Family Member – This webinar explores how family members of youth and adults with mental health conditions can effectively support their family member’s recovery and improve whole family wellness.
- The Time is NOW: Peer-Run Organizations and Integrated Care Learning Community – This Learning Community provides an opportunity to continue the ongoing conversation about how peers and peer organizations can position themselves to promote recovery values and drive systems change through integrated care.
- The Time is NOW: Peer-Run Organizations and Integrated Care Webinar – This webinar looks at the challenges and opportunities presented by integrated care, and the implications for mental health peers and peer-run organizations in their efforts to promote recovery values and drive systems change.
- Self-Disclosure, Representation, and Empowerment Learning Community – This Learning Community examines the decisions people with lived experience of mental health conditions make about how they talk about their own mental health, how mental health is represented in our public discourse, and how people can create a space for their own empowerment and impact the way mental health is perceived.
- A Foundation for Your Finances: A Review of the Basic Building Blocks of Personal Financial Sustainability for Peers and Consumers Learning Community – In this Learning Community, participants learned from each other about how to overcome challenges related to personal finance that can be exacerbated by their lived experience.
- Destigmatizing Mental Health, Inside and Out: A Youth Perspective – In this webinar, one young leader, shares her leadership story, explaining how she has confronted her own internal hesitancy to recognize her mental health needs, as well as the stigma that discourages people from openly discussing mental health in their communities, homes, and workplaces.
- Peer Leadership Learning Community – This Learning Community explores the topic of peer leadership, and how people with mental health conditions can turn their lived experience into positive change in their communities.
- A Foundation for Your Finances: A Review of the Basic Building Blocks of Personal Financial Sustainability for Peers and Consumers Webinar – This webinar covers financial literacy and banking basics.
- Leadership Roles for Peers and Peer Specialists . . . within Peer-Run Organizations, the CPS Industry, and the Peer Community – This webinar explores leadership in the mental health lived experience context and examines different leadership paths, including roles within peer-led organizations, promoting the value of lived experience and peer support to potential partners, and creating a community of recovery through networking and service.
Training Archive
Trainings from throughout CAFE TAC’s history can be found below.