Podcast
Ep. 8 Transcript: Family Peer Support with Cristy Corbin
Transcript
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Welcome to Peer Into Recovery, a podcast with a focus on the profession of peer support. For more information about how to subscribe, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. And thank you for joining us. I am your host, Danielle Donaldson. In this episode, I am going to be speaking with Cristy Corbin about family peer support. Cristy Corbin has been an integral part in developing the family support partner role in Virginia over the past 11 years. In her most recent job position, Cristy was representing the family perspective and voice throughout Virginia as the system of care state family lead for Virginia’s system of care grants. In this role, Cristy was providing training, support, and program consultation to a wide variety of grant sites until this grant funding ended on September 30, 2020. Due to the unprecedented need for this type of role and Cristy’s passion to continue the work, Cristy founded Family Support Partners of Virginia Incorporated, a peer support service provider to ensure parents, caregivers, youth, and adult individuals throughout Virginia will continue to have an option for this form of peer support. As a subject matter expert, Cristy provides a variety of trainings, peer support program development and consultation, peer support workforce development, supervision and coaching, and continued advocacy for family voice and choice, and policy changes and development to better serve this recovery community. Cristy has served on a variety of committees, support groups, and boards, ensuring that the family and use perspectives were included and honored in the decision making processes, and currently serves as the parent representative on the Virginia Children’s Services Act’s state and local advisory team. So, hi Cristy, thank you so much for joining me. How are you doing today?
CRISTY CORBIN: Hi Danielle, I am doing great. Thank you so much for having me.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Well, we’re happier here. Let’s just get right into it then. Could you share with the audience how you got started as a family support partner?
CRISTY CORBIN: Sure, it has been quite the journey of how this has developed over the years. My personal experiences as a parent navigating the behavioral health system with my own child started back in 2010, and I couldn’t get connected to our community resources. One, I didn’t know they existed. And then two, when I tried to get connected with them, I was informed that my daughter wasn’t being supported by the correct child-serving agencies so that I could utilize the system. And I started digging deeper, trying to figure out where I could get the support and the resources that we needed. And I stumbled upon this place at the time called the Children’s Mental Health Resource Center. That’s a program of Virginia Treatment Center for Children. And I communicated with the director there and was sharing my story with her and letting her know that I wanted to reach out to other parents so that I could share with them my experiences so that they didn’t have to struggle in the same sense that I did. And she actually offered me a job. I was expecting to volunteer for her in that program. And she offered to pay me for my experience to support families. And through that process, I was supporting by phone most of the time. And I was also helping to gather more information about resources that were available throughout Virginia, because it’s a statewide program. And then at the same time, that program director was connected with United Methodist Family Services and their system of care grant that they were operating. And I also was hired by them to be a parent support partner, which is what our titles were in the beginning. So initially, I started doing this work in 2014 is when I got hired. And for both companies, I was working two part-time jobs. Like within two weeks of each other, I was hired by them and started providing peer support to parents and caregivers, trying to navigate our child serving systems and trying to figure out where all of the community resources were and also formal supports to help them on their journey.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: And that’s such an important part of peer support, I think actually is just navigating the system. And when you have someone that you can reach out to who can help you navigate, it changes everything.
CRISTY CORBIN: Absolutely.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: It was so good.
CRISTY CORBIN: It was very rewarding in what I was doing. Not only because I was able to make a difference and help impact the families that I was supporting, but also learning more about our system and helping to shine a light on where the resources were, so that families could connect with them. And also teaching the other providers that I was connected with and supporting the families and informing them. They didn’t know of some of the community resources that were available. So it was a win-win-win all the way around.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Yeah. I can definitely see that. So would you mind sharing for those who may not be aware, how does a family peer supporter or a family support partner, what do they have in common with a peer recovery support specialist and how do they differ?
CRISTY CORBIN: That is a question that I get asked frequently because they’re very similar and yet they’re kind of different. So the requirement to be a family support partner is that you are a parent or a direct caregiver of a child or youth, typically under the age of 18, with the experience of navigating any of the child-serving systems in Virginia. So that could be all the way from the pediatric emergency room to the school setting, the juvenile justice setting, any of the child-serving systems that you’ve had that direct experience with them, and you can connect with other parents and caregivers to help them navigate those systems. The peer recovery specialist side of things is typically more of the adult individual that has the lived experience of mental health and or substance use challenges and trying to navigate systems to get support for their recovery and that sort of thing. So the similarity is that we are parents or caregivers, because and I use the term parent loosely, it can be a biological foster adoptive kinship setting. It’s just the requirement is you’re the direct caregiver of that young person. So we have that level of lived experience where the peer recovery specialist has their individual lived experience and then they’re reaching out to support others. And some of the family support partners like myself are also peer recovery specialist because we also have our own lived experience of mental health and or substance use challenges. So I am certified as a peer recovery specialist, and some of the family support partners that I’m connected with are also certified peer recovery specialists, and some of them are registered as peer recovery specialists.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Okay. So what does a typical day in the life look for you as a family support partner?
CRISTY CORBIN: So we get our referrals, how we’re connected to families through a formal process in Virginia. It’s called the Children’s Services Act. So there is a case manager from one of the child serving agencies that will request funding through their localities process for the Children’s Services Act funding. And we will be contacted by a case manager to connect with a family that they’ve identified and the family has agreed that they would be open to being supported by a family support partner. And so once we receive that information of the family, we will reach out to that family typically through a phone call to make a connection with them, to introduce ourselves and let them know who we are and how we came about to be connected with them. And then start asking questions of them, what’s happening, what’s going on, really getting to know that family and that youth as best we can. And then we’ll usually set up a time to meet. And pre-COVID, we did home visits where we would go to the family’s home, if that’s where they were comfortable meeting or we would meet them somewhere in their community or sometimes they would come to our office setting, but that wasn’t as frequent. It was usually we went to them. And so, then we would start that process of building a relationship. And we would be in communication with the families typically every week. And so, as we’re building that relationship and getting to know them, we’re learning about what they need. And so, there’s ongoing conversations, like I said, usually weekly. Sometimes it’s multiple times during the week. Sometimes depending on the family’s needs and the other supports that they have in their lives, we may only touch base once a week. But then there’s also occasional meetings that we have with families. So, our day-to-day is typically making sure that we are responsive to phone calls or emails or if there’s a Zoom meeting and, you know, to support the family that way. And so, it kind of depends, it will vary from family to family of how frequent we’re communicating with them. And then, of course, we also will communicate with the other team members that they might be connected with the other providers that they have to make sure that if the provider has something that they need to get from the family and the youth, that maybe the family support partner has a stronger relationship or they already have a meeting scheduled, that we can gather that information for them. And so, we’re in constant communication with the family. We do make time to incorporate the youth’s voice, too. We’ll connect with them. Whichever communication style suits them, we’ll honor that, whether it’s text messaging or emails or, again, phone and Zoom. Sometimes, even now, we will meet families in the community, we’ll outside. So, there’s a lot of variety of how we communicate and what we’re keeping up with regarding families. So, again, it just depends on what’s going on with them, of how frequent we’re in communication with them.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: How many different families do you support at any given time?
CRISTY CORBIN: I love that question, too, Danielle, because there’s a variety of answers to that. It depends on which agency you’re speaking with. Some agencies will assign up to 20 families for one full-time family support partner. Other agencies for part-time family support partners, it’s typically up to six. It truly varies from agency to agency. What I’ve learned over the years is the sweet spot, typically for family support partner, is about 12 families for a full-time position. For a part-time position, it’s definitely no more than six, because what happens is you start losing the quality of work that you can provide and support to that family. If you have too many, like I experienced time and time again, when I was in the heat of things with my daughter, crises would come up. And so as a support partner, that’s part of what we do is we help families plan for crises. We don’t respond to crises as they’re happening. We help them have connections to address those crises, but we’ll support after the fact and debrief and make sure that if the plan didn’t work, we’ll refocus that plan to make sure it works for them. So when those types of things come up, if you have a huge workload, you’re not going to be as effective as you can be if you have a more manageable level of families that you’re assigned to work with.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: How many different agencies throughout Virginia have family support partners working for them?
CRISTY CORBIN: So there are a variety of grant sites. So the system of care grants in Virginia, there are some grant sites that extended their grant dollars due to COVID. So the grant originates from SAMHSA, and through the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services. So all of the family support partners in Virginia originated through the SAMHSA grant back in 2014. So originally, there was only United Methodist Family Services in the Richmond area that had family support partners. Once that grant cycle ended back in 2016, Virginia was also awarded another SAMHSA grant to expand the work that we were doing. So there were multiple community services boards throughout Virginia that took part of that grant. And so there are, I think, maybe six, five or six CSBs across Virginia that have family support partners. And there are a couple of private agencies that now have family support partners. So we are definitely more readily available today than we were five years ago. So there, again, it varies across the state of who has the family support partners. And so a lot of the grant sites still do. And again, some of the private agencies have developed a position for family support partners as well. Most of it’s based off of the work that we were doing through the system of care grants.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Well, and I guess it’s probably very similar to the peer recovery support in that it’s still kind of relatively new and it’s still growing and developing. And hopefully over time, you’ll see family support partners in far more locations, and they’ll be much more readily accessible.
CRISTY CORBIN: Yes.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: So are there any particular challenges that family support partners face? And I mean, as a profession, is there anything that makes it unique?
CRISTY CORBIN: Yes. One of the things that stands out is we don’t experience this as much anymore as we used to in the beginning. But because we are so new to Virginia and to the service providers throughout Virginia, typically when you encounter another provider working with the family, they might have a thought process about a parent. And when you introduce yourself as a parent with lived experience of navigating the system, and then here you are in their meeting to support another family, there may be that ideal of, oh, you’re one of them, or oh, you’re just a parent, or what could you possibly offer? You don’t have a college education. Like there’s all different levels of how people receive family support partners. We again, we’ve come a long way in Virginia from that, but with the areas that are new to family support partners, I think on occasion that still happens. I hear about it once in a while. And so really the being able to express and show the value and the validity of the role, which is why when I’m encountering other family support partners, I speak frequently about the professionalism, how important it is that we conduct ourselves in a professional manner at all times, because usually we’re already behind the eight ball when it comes to encountering other people supporting families and youth, because they might have a certain concept or idea of parents. And then we have to work really hard to kind of debunk that stigma that’s not how we’re operating here. You know, we are a professional, we are trained, we are supervised, we are supported, and we do bring value to this process. And so that has been one of the biggest challenges that we’ve had. And then the other thing is just the awareness. It’s not everybody knows about us, so they don’t know exactly how to connect with us or ask for a family support partner to help them through the process with their child. So those are probably the two biggest things that stand out for me.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Well, and I could see the awareness. I can understand that situation as well as a peer recovery specialist, because I still think that in Virginia and possibly probably everywhere nationally, that there’s so many people who don’t realize that this support exists.
CRISTY CORBIN: Exactly.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: And of course, and it’s not always easy to find. So the awareness will help increase the visibility and hopefully more people will learn that this type of support is available to them, because I can definitely see the usefulness and the need for it. Yes. So because we do focus on the profession of peer support in this podcast, do you have any recommendations or suggestions for others who would like to become a family support partner?
CRISTY CORBIN: Yes. So one of the ways that I got started and has been near and dear to my heart over the years is connecting with the Virginia Family Network. It is a program of, it’s connected to, I guess I should say, NAMI Virginia, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. So the Virginia Family Network is designed to assist and support parents and caregivers of all walks of life. Again, it doesn’t matter if they’re biological, adoptive, kinship, foster care, to get them educated and trained on a variety of topics. There’s one thing in particular that has, it was my catalyst for getting to where I am, is the Advanced Parent Leadership Training. It is, it used to be a two-day, a very full two-day training over the weekend, and we just recently converted it to virtual. And I still am part of that process. I was one of the first parents in Virginia to be trained in it, and then I was also one of the first ones to be trained, to train it, to facilitate the training. So that would definitely be the place to start, because also what’s going to happen is once you connect with Virginia Family Network, you’re going to be engulfed by a large group of other parent leaders who are all across Virginia, who are either formally working as a family support partner, or they may have other types of positions in their communities as a parent leader. And it’s a great place to network, and it’s a great place to learn, and to really get started with what all of this work is. So that would definitely be the place to go to get more information about family support partners.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: And that is through, so they would reach out to NAMI Virginia for that information?
CRISTY CORBIN: Yes. So namivirginia.org, spell out Virginia, and you can search for on the left-hand side of their homepage will be information for parents and caregivers. And when you click on that, it will take you to Virginia Family Networks page. And all the information will be there of where to get started and how to get connected.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: And so is there a certification process, a testing process if they wanted to do this formally, how would that work?
CRISTY CORBIN: So with us, it’s a little bit different. So with the, so no, not formally, there isn’t training or testing for becoming a family support partner. Unless you’re hired by an agency, and that can be a community services board or a private entity, that offers family support partners. And typically the way that we’re utilized predominantly throughout Virginia is within a evidence-based model of that helps families plan, well, helps them identify their needs and then plan for those needs. It’s called High Fidelity Wraparound, and the service is provided through intensive care coordination, and then a family support partner. And we also in Virginia have youth support partners as well. Those are the young adults who have the direct systems experience. So, if you’re hired by an agency and you’re going to be providing family support partner services through the High Fidelity Wraparound model, then there is a formal training to take for that. And again, that used to be a three-day training. It’s now a four-day virtual training. And we just finished a cohort earlier today of that training. So, that would only be, that’s the only formal type of training that would be required to do the work within that model. There’s other ways that family support partners can be utilized with families. So, that’s not an absolute that, if you’re hired, that’s the only thing that you can do. There’s plenty of other avenues for how a family support partner can support another family navigating their behavioral health systems with their child.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Are there many opportunities to do this work as a volunteer?
CRISTY CORBIN: So, not typically in this aspect. Again, there may be some other places like community services boards that may have opportunities to do some form of family support or other private agencies. The work that happens through NAMI Virginia and Virginia Family Network, all of that is conducted as volunteers. So, when, like for example, when I’m facilitating the Advanced Parent Leadership Training with my co-facilitator, we’re doing that as volunteers. And it’s not the formal support of a family support partner. It is a form of being a parent leader and providing that type of peer support in that you are training your peers. And then also as a support group leader for parents, specific to parents who might have children under the age of 18 that have obtained a diagnosis of some sort or having some type of emotional or behavioral challenges. There’s a way to that, you know, that’s a form of peer support and you do that as a volunteer through Virginia Family Network. So, there are some avenues. And again, it’ll vary from agency to agency and it’ll vary from like what you do within maybe your local NAMI affiliate or if you’re connected with Virginia Family Network and how you support them and the parents that are connected there.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: OK, I understand. Yeah, well, it sounds like there’s quite a spectrum. And again, that does relate back to peer recovery support as well. There’s, you know, not everybody has to be trained and certified to offer peer recovery support. There’s other ways to to share your skills and talents without having to do it formally.
CRISTY CORBIN: Exactly.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: So do you have any final thoughts or resources that you would? I mean, I know you’ve already shared some, but if you have any additional resources that you would like to share or final thoughts?
CRISTY CORBIN: One thing that I’ll share that is directly related to Peer Recovery Specialist and the formal training that we have for that is there is a great effort underway to get a, I don’t know if it’ll be a supplemental training or if it’ll be a restructuring of the current training. I’m not sure what it’s going to look like, but there’s an effort being made to enhance the family support partner pieces of the current Peer Recovery Specialist training to make sure that family support partners are getting what they need from that curriculum. There’s always, because we’re so new to this, to Virginia, there’s all kinds of things that are happening where we’re growing and expanding. There is a, if anybody identifies as a parent leader and or are currently working as a family support partner or in that same type of capacity and supporting families with navigating the system, we do have a monthly parent leader network meeting. Again, it’s through Zoom, it’s all virtual. So there are parent leaders from all over Virginia that attend this. And it’s kind of a form of professional development. There’s always a topic that we’re discussing and getting a training on. And then there’s usually time for open discussion. If there’s certain needs or concerns people want to talk through. And all of that can be found on the website at Virginia Family Network through NAMI Virginia.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Oh, great, great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I feel like I’ve learned a lot. I hope the audience has too.
CRISTY CORBIN: Yeah, it is a lot. There’s a lot of information. So thank you so much for allowing me the time to share.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Oh, thank you. And thank you for joining me. And thank you for listening to the Peer Into Recovery podcast brought to you by the Virginia Peer Recovery Specialist Network and Mental Health America of Virginia. If you like our show and would like to subscribe to the podcast, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. And please leave us a review on iTunes. Take good care of yourselves.
