Orientation
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”
– Helen Keller


Program Introduction
The Peer Collective is focused on helping you understand how you may connect with other parts of your community or other communities to live more independently and successfully. Living independently means you may face challenges or barriers from time to time.
The Peer Collective is intended to help you address personal challenges or barriers you face by making use of a variety of supports in your life. Through the course of this workshop, you will work to identify areas of your life where you currently have support or may be able to access increased support. Support can be in person, in your community, through technology, online, or in some other way that’s unique to your lived experience.
Supports exist for everyone. Many different types of support exist, and you will explore the different types of supports. Then you will consider what supports currently exist in your life. You will then consider setting a personal goal for increasing one type of support in your life.

Introductions
First, we’ll get to know each other and set some ground rules for our time together as a group.

Exploring Types of Support
As you begin to get to know yourself better and consider your physical, mental, and emotional health, you may realize that taking care of everything on your own can be exhausting! Taking care of yourself might be a lot easier if you had some assistance from others.
Let’s explore different types of supports and how they might help you live more independently.

Preparing for the Next Session
In our next session, each of us will work on identifying our existing social supports and set personal social support goals to work on for the rest of the workshop. As we get ready for this, let’s review what we have covered today.