H.O.P.E.: "The evaluation was an experiment in empowering peer support program staff"
Two research companies, Live & Learn Inc. and Human Services Research Institute, worked with HOPE program staff to conduct an evaluation to understand and report the impact of the HOPE program on participants, in addition to Whole Person Pilot-required data.
HOPE (Helping Our Peers Emerge) is a peer-run program in San Mateo, California. HOPE supports Peer Participants in transition from psychiatric hospitalization to community integration through Peer Mentoring, Family Partnership, and Supportive Employment Coordination. HOPE is a collaborative of San Mateo County Behavioral Health and Recovery, Heart & Soul Inc., California Clubhouse, and National Alliance on Mental Illness-San Mateo County. It was created as a Whole Person Pilot program under California's Medicaid Section 1115 waiver. The program takes an alternative approach to mental health recovery by providing evidence-based wellness tools and practices, such as Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP®), Intentional Peer Support, and Motivational Interviewing.
HOPE Program Provides Valuable Support
The HOPE program was created to provide “whole person care.” According to the California Department of Health Care Services, the goal of “whole person care” is to efficiently coordinate person-centered health, behavioral health, and social services with the goal of improved physical health, mental health, and well-being. Based on the evaluation, the HOPE program appears to have been successful.
The data for this evaluation show that over time, HOPE program participants improved in important outcome domains such as their level of hope, quality of life, and social connections. The evaluation also showed that, overall, participants were very satisfied with services that they received from the HOPE staff.
There were challenges to collecting and analyzing data, but the results reported here suggest the HOPE program’s peer support services are a valuable addition to the lives of service users in San Mateo County. While only 5 Follow-Up surveys were completed, the results we do have show improvements in participants’ quality of life may continue after leaving the HOPE program.
Equity in Access to Affordable Tools
The HOPE program was a collaboration between three different stakeholder organizations in San Mateo County that came together to provide peer and family mentoring to participants in order to promote well-being, community integration, and recovery. Led by Heart & Soul Inc., a peer-run organization, the HOPE program benefited from this innovative partnership with California Clubhouse and a local family-run NAMI chapter. These collaborations between behavioral health service providers are precisely what the Whole Person Pilot program seeks to promote.
The evaluation itself was an experiment in empowering peer support program staff – all of whom are either people with lived experience or family members – to understand the impact of the services they provide on the people that they serve through “self-evaluation.” Direct service providers are often required to collect, monitor, analyze, and report data on participant experiences and outcomes to compete for funding. Peer-run programs may be at a unique disadvantage compared to professionally-run programs in self-evaluation because programs run by professionals often have more resources including formal education, robust professional networks, or services that are a better ‘fit’ with traditional evaluation methods.
HOPE program staff worked with peer researchers from Live & Learn, Inc., and professional evaluators from HSRI, to learn skills such as creating a logic model, choosing survey measures, and research ethics and interview techniques. They also received help analyzing and reporting on the data they collected.
In a regulatory environment of fiscal conservancy and public accountability, it is essential that peer-run organizations have access to affordable tools to conduct evaluations of their programs so that these services maintain their quality and availability, and continue to benefit service users.