Recovery Partners

Proud of our peers and the people we support​
We’re proud to have been the first peer-led organisation in the UK offering peer support, training and consultancy in peer support and mental health recovery. We are 100% user-led. Here’s a summary of our journey so far…

OUR STORY
An opportunity to be inspired
In 2008 a small number of people from across Sussex living with mental health challenges came together to be trained as Peer Support Specialists by Recovery Innovations.

Peer Support Specialists are people with their own lived experiences of mental ill-health and mental health services, who are trained and supported to provide support and to model recovery to other people. This was funded by Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, who had heard about the brilliant work being done in the States on peer support.

Recovery Innovations, based in Arizona, have pioneered a peer support approach to mental health recovery in the USA. Their values of hope, respect, dignity, empowerment and community – together with the most exciting and inspiring training we have ever had – inspired us to set up our own services.

We formed a group called Sussex Peer Approach (SPA). Two of us completed the training needed to train further groups of Peer Support Specialists. SPA was supported to develop by grants from Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and East Sussex County Council.

SPA was our ‘mother’ organisation, and following re-organisation, Recovery Partners was established as a not-for-profit company in February 2011. We successfully bid for funding from East Sussex County Council and from 2012 to 2017 we offered a range of open-access services to people with mental health challenges across East Sussex. From 2015 to 2017 we co-delivered The Place of Calm suicide prevention crisis house in Eastbourne with Sussex Oakleaf. We became a charity in 2019.

And now… we are a small, committed and professional organisation where every employee is a peer. We have developed a thriving Experts by Experience project working with East Sussex County Council and Brighton and Hove City Council, and have an innovative arts branch, Heart Matters, specialising in peer-led recovery using arts practices, for people living with severe and enduring mental illness.

We are proud of our people, the people who use our services, and our determination to demonstrate that living well in recovery from mental health challenges is absolutely possible.