About Us

Founded in 2003, the Copeland Center has built a successful national organization that serves as the hub of an organic, grassroots movement of tens of thousands of individuals with lived experience of mental health challenges and hundreds of institutions using evidence-based peer support and self-help strategies for achieving personal and community-wide wellness and recovery. The Copeland Center is recognized as the world’s preeminent organization advancing the knowledge, skills, and values of evidence-based peer recovery practices. Over the previous decade, the Copeland Center has branched out to deliver a more diversified range of educational, training, and technical assistance services to individuals and institutions advancing community inclusion, peer support, and the sustainable operation of peer-run organizations. Doors to Wellbeing was established in 2015 - a federally-funded National Consumer Technical Assistance Center- consumer referring to people with lived experience with mental illness. The Copeland Center is a peer-run non-profit - our staff and board of directors are composed of people with serious mental health challenges and/or are healing from trauma. Additionally, the Copeland Center uses its platform on the national stage to promote diverse voices in our community on a variety of mental health topics - bringing the voices of youth, leaders in marginalized communities, and multilingual and multicultural perspectives to our work- we offer our experts by experience with mental health challenges and diverse identities.

Looking forward, the Copeland Center is committed to bring greater accessibility to mental health education and support  from culturally relevant sources in all communities in the US.

The Copeland Center has built a reputation and practice for excellence in peer support and recovery education and practices. We have built a community where we reach over 35,000 peers each year. In this past year, we have collaborated with over 300 community organizations across the US to provide training and technical assistance. In the past 3 years, we have produced over 500 events. The approach we use is “Nothing About Us Without Us” and “Each one, Teach one!”. The Copeland Center has created experiential train-the-trainer approaches to build safe and accepting environments that prepare people to go back into their communities and implement evidence-based peer group interventions and peer support.

The Copeland Center team are recognized content experts in the fields of evidence-based mental health treatment; community inclusion, peer support, recovery, and peer facilitation; integrating peer support with diversified practices and communities; strengthening the peer workforce, empowering individuals with Serious Mental Illness; and improving psychiatric crisis treatment and shared decision making through the use of Psychiatric Advance Directives. Staff are also experienced and qualified educators, trainers, and technical assistance providers, with a collective track record of educating, training, and assisting tens of thousands of consumers/peers, healthcare administrators, mental health and integrated healthcare practitioners, and other stakeholders from the private and public sector. We do all of this while committed to the values of peer support such as self-determination, hope, and the deep belief that people can and do recover which we know from personal experience.