Incubator Projects: Ideas that grew here
Since 2023, the Peer Leadership Incubator has supported peer and lived experience leaders from across the world to turn their ideas into action. Some arrived with a fully formed plan, and some with just a conviction that something needed to change. The projects below span housing, research, policy, education, publishing, technology and community peer support, across more than a dozen countries, and behind every one of them is a peer leader who decided their idea deserved a chance.
If one of these projects speaks to your own work, or sits close to something you are building in your community, do reach out. These connections are how peer leadership grows its influence, and many of the collaborations that matter most start with someone simply saying "Hey, I’m working on something similar."
Peer Leadership Incubator Class of 2025
Hayley Peek
Canada
AI and Peer Support. Exploring how peer supporters can lead the ethical use of AI in mental health, ensuring technology enhances vs replaces the human connection at the heart of peer support.
Flóris Roland
Hungary
Legal and Advocacy Awareness Training for Peers. Designing a training programme to equip lived experience practitioners with skills in legal awareness, advocacy, and rights-based support for peers navigating systems.
Jo Lomani
England
Senior Lived Experience Leadership. Growing the senior lived experience workforce in UK policymaking through an online platform for peer leaders to connect, share, and influence national decisions.
Cheryl Tasker
Scotland
Peer Circles in Forth Valley. Developing community-based Peer Circles in Stirling to reduce isolation, foster mutual support, and shift from medical-driven to peer-led recovery.
Ann Kasper
USA
Peer History VR Museum. Creating a Virtual Reality museum to preserve and share the history of the peer movement, connecting generations and expanding access to peer principles worldwide.
Amy Roberts
England
Embedding Peer Support Frameworks in a clinical setting. Implementing an organisational framework to embed and sustain lived experience roles within NHS services, ensuring equity, cultural change, and long-term impact.
Promise Adetoro
Nigeria
Train the Trainers Mental Health Peer Support in Schools. Training teachers as mental health champions across 40 schools per region, equipping them to integrate mental health education, run peer support clubs, and reach up to 80,000 students and their communities.
Yvonne Benson
Canada
Peer-Led Housing Initiative. Developing safe, affordable, peer-governed housing for people with mental health and addiction challenges, fostering independence, belonging, and system change through lived experience leadership.
Jane Chevous
England
International Survivor-Led Peer Support Network. Expanding a proven survivor-led, trauma-informed peer support model into an international network of groups and a community of practice, with targeted spaces for marginalised survivors and published collective narratives to amplify survivor wisdom.
Michael John Norton
Ireland
Peer Supervision Model. Co-designing a supervision pathway for peer and family peer workers that respects lived experience knowledge and offers support tailored to their unique needs.
Amy Crellin
England
Lived Experience in Quality & Safety. Embedding lived experience leadership in NHS quality and safety oversight of inpatient care, challenging poor practice and shaping relational, recovery-focused standards.
Aiyana Goodfellow
England
Growing abolitionist peer support. Exploring how abolitionist peer-led organisations can define and measure success on their own terms: balancing growth with values, resisting commodification, and strengthening community-based leadership.
Nil Suner
England
Lived Experience Podcast Platform. Expanding a podcast series into a shared YouTube channel showcasing global lived experience voices, formats, and collaborations, creating a platform for peer-led storytelling and knowledge exchange.
Peer Leadership Incubator Class of 2024
Tim Adwick
England
From One-Off Event to Community Engagement Strategy. Turning a single event featuring a human library and graffiti walls into a lasting strategy for community engagement, using peer leadership and active participation to drive change.
Ellie Wildbore
England
Lived Experience Research Ambassadors in the NHS. Building a network of lived experience researchers within an NHS trust, strengthening the role and visibility of peer research inside the health system.
Stéphane Waha
Belgium
Peer Support in the Workplace. Developing a workplace peer support programme in partnership with HR departments and government, alongside building French-language recovery resources to bring the recovery approach onto the political agenda.
Brayden Robinson
USA
Peer-Led Supervision and Certification Reform. Working towards sustainable policy change so that peer workers are supervised by peers rather than solely by mental health professionals, alongside reform of certification processes.
Ellen Maloney
Scotland
Scottish Peer Researcher Network. Advocating for lived experience roles within academia and creating a peer researcher network for Scotland, created and led by lived experience, to define the role and support those working in it.
Amanda McMillan
Canada
Perinatal Peer Support and Respite. Expanding a peer support programme for families experiencing perinatal mood disorders, including in-home peer respite for new parents.
Samah Hashim
Qatar
Youth-Led Mental Health for Refugee Communities. Establishing a youth-led initiative bringing peer support and recovery-based education to Somali refugee communities in Qatar.
Cassandra Barkman
Netherlands
Peer-Led Outreach. Creating an outreach service led and delivered entirely by peers, providing options for people who cannot or will not engage with mainstream mental health services, and building a movement around it.
Allison Dunning
Canada
A National Ethics Framework for Peer Support. Building and co-developing an ethics framework for peer support in Canada, shaped with and for the peer workforce.
Peer Leadership Incubator Class of 2023
Inge Esselen
Belgium
Project HOPE. Creating spaces and training for peer coaches to connect with and support young people (8yrs+), building better peer connections and prevention for youth, including young people in refugee camps in Africa. Working with Howest University to co-create games that help young people find hope, strength and ideas for the future.
John Gerrard
Canada
We Make Clocks, Not Time. Launching a book exploring lived experience of psychosis, creativity, and the ideas that helped along the way, and developing the craft of bringing lived experience storytelling into the world, with a second book, Reconstruction Quest, exploring the struggles and joys of being neurodivergent, to follow.
Tamara Throssell
Canada
Family Peer Support at Foundry. Developing orientation to family services including a core family peer support stream, working with families and caregivers as partners in care and as staff members with lived experience within an integrated team.
Jayne Thomas
Wales
Individualised Peer Coaching. Developing a one-to-one coaching offer that blends mentorship, peer support and coaching approaches into a single individualised model.
Chris Hansen
USA
Peer Support for Senior Lived Experience Leaders. Working with the IPLN to connect senior lived experience leaders and peer leaders working at strategic and decision-making tables, creating space for co-reflection and peer support for a group who often carry that role alone.
Kelly Gilmour
Scotland
Family Peer Support at Foundry. Developing orientation to family services including a core family peer support stream, working with families and caregivers as partners in care and as staff members with lived experience within an integrated team.