A Refugee and Immigrant Peer Support Program in the United States

This field report describes the development and implementation of a curriculum for peer psychosocial support (PSS) for refugees and immigrants in the United States. From 2017 to 2019, we piloted an adapted PSS multistakeholder-approved peer curriculum to assess its relevance in several refugee groups. The program certified 106 peer support specialists from backgrounds representing 35 countries and more than 38 languages. The PSS model supports task shifting, including skill development by peers to bridge care to mental health specialists available in the US context, aiming to increase access to clinical and community services for forcibly displaced persons.

The PSS curriculum (1) incorporates refugee voices and lived experiences, (2) enhances peers’ knowledge and skills in supporting other refugees’ emotional wellbeing and (3) provides avenues for refugees to obtain job opportunities within health and social service settings in resettled contexts. Peers voiced lessons learned about the peer role, explanation of services, importance of stigma reduction, multicultural teamwork, and use of personal disclosure. These are presented so that other practitioners, researchers, health, and social workers may further innovate peer models for forcibly displaced persons in resettlement settings. Refugee-adapted peer support may fill critical gaps in peer programs that typically neglect lived experiences of forcibly displaced persons.