LCSNW Refugee & Immigrant Peer Support Training

LCSNW Refugee & Immigrant Peer Support Training Our training is state certified through the Oregon Health Authority.

Lutheran Community Services Northwest (LCSNW) is proud to offer the only mental health peer support specialist training exclusively for refugee and immigrant communities in Oregon.

IRCO has a great Leadership program for immigrant and refugee community members! Application deadline is November 27th.
10/27/2021

IRCO has a great Leadership program for immigrant and refugee community members! Application deadline is November 27th.

Awesome Resource Fair happening tomorrow at the Rosewood Initiative! Come say hello!
08/28/2021

Awesome Resource Fair happening tomorrow at the Rosewood Initiative! Come say hello!

Tomorrow at our Portland office! Housing workshop with Home Forward about affordable and subsidized housing. There will ...
08/16/2021

Tomorrow at our Portland office! Housing workshop with Home Forward about affordable and subsidized housing. There will be Russian interpretation for these events.

LCSNW is having a vaccine event tomorrow with OHSU! It will be at our Portland office and we'll be offering the Pfizer a...
06/22/2021

LCSNW is having a vaccine event tomorrow with OHSU! It will be at our Portland office and we'll be offering the Pfizer and J&J one dose vaccines! No appointments needed!

Happening now until 6pm at Lutheran's Portland office! Come get your vaccine and a food bag! Tell your friends!
06/02/2021

Happening now until 6pm at Lutheran's Portland office! Come get your vaccine and a food bag! Tell your friends!

Some good news:
05/04/2021

Some good news:

Today, I am revising the United States’ annual refugee admissions cap to 62,500 for this fiscal year. This erases the historically low number set by the

04/26/2021

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605 SE Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard
Portland, OR
97214

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Monday 8am - 5pm
Tuesday 8am - 5pm
Wednesday 8am - 5pm
Thursday 8am - 5pm
Friday 8am - 2:30pm

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Refugee & Immigrant Peer Support

Since 2016, Lutheran Community Services Northwest (LCSNW) has been working on filling the gap between the employment of Peer Support Specialists (PSS) in behavioral healthcare and refugee and immigrant communities. With support from the Mental Health Prevention and Promotion (MHPP) grant, LCSNW adapted an 80-hour Oregon State approved peer support specialist and community health worker training into an Oregon State approved 40-hour mental health peer support specialist training for refugees and immigrants.

This training program targets underserved and underrepresented communities who have limited to no resources. Ethnic and racial minorities in the United States tend to have less access to and receive less benefit from behavioral health services. Stigma, language, a lack of culturally-grounded interventions, a lack of trained providers, and issues related to service delivery all combine to make this disparity worse. Because mental health symptoms and expressions of distress vary by culture, high fidelity models normed on white populations will never work for everyone. One way to overcome these barriers and achieve better behavioral health outcomes is by employing refugee and immigrant peer support specialist interventions.

With Oregon Health Authority (OHA) approval and support from MHPP, LCSNW held their first pilot training in 2017. To help continue our fight for equity and representation in behavioral health, LCSNW was awarded funding from Meyer Memorial Trust and held four more trainings in 2018 and 2019 in Multnomah and Washington counties for refugee and immigrant community members.

LCSNW was able to leverage the success of and interest in our training to expand our reach into substance use disorders (SUD). In 2020, we were awarded a grant from Health Share of Oregon to adapt our mental health PSS training to a SUD PSS training specifically for refugee and immigrant communities.