What is a Peer Recovery Coach?

A Peer Recovery Coach works to remove barriers and obstacles to recovery by serving as a personal guide. Recovery Coaches enter into an ongoing mentoring relationship that helps folks who are in recovery or who are considering recovery from substance use disorders to produce extraordinary results in their lives, careers, businesses, or organizations. Recovery Coaches are people in long term recovery. Coaches:

  • Affirm that there is innate health and wellness in you as a person in recovery.

  • Believe that you are creative and resourceful.

  • Do not promote or endorse any single or particular way of achieving or maintaining sobriety, abstinence, or serenity or of reducing suffering from substance use disorders.

  • Focus is on coaching you to create and sustain a great and meaningful life. Use a strengths-based approach—we will help you find and utilize your values, assets, and strengths while we coach you to success.


    Through the process of Recovery Coaching, you will deepen your learning, improve your performance, and enhance your quality of life. In each meeting with your Coach, you will choose the focus of conversation, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions. This interaction will create clarity and move you toward action. Recovery Coaching will accelerate your progress in recovery by providing greater focus and awareness of choices, actions, and responsibility. Coaching concentrates on where you are now and what you are willing to do to enjoy a better tomorrow.

A Peer Recovery Coach Is not/Does not ...

  • A professional

  • Give professional advice

  • An expert or authority figure

  • See the person as a case or diagnosis

  • Motivate through fear of negative consequences

  • Prescribe one specific pathway to recovery

  • Represents perspective of the program

  • Do tasks for the person

  • Give resources and money to the person

  • Provide basic necessities such as a place to live

  • Use clinical language

  • Provide professional services

  • Diagnose, assess, treat

  • Mandate tasks and behaviors

  • Tell person how to lead his/her life in recovery

A Peer Recovery Coach Is/Does...

  • A person in recovery

  • Share lived experience

  • A role model

  • See the person as a whole person in the context of the person’s roles, family, community

  • Motivate through hope and inspiration

  • Support many pathways to recovery

  • Function as an advocate for the person in recovery, both within and outside of the program

  • Teach the person how to accomplish daily tasks

  • Teach how to acquire needed resources, including money

  • Help the person find basic necessities

  • Use language based on common experiences

  • Help the person find professional services from lawyers, doctors, psychologists, financial advisers

  • Share knowledge of local resources

  • Encourage, support, praise

  • Help to set personal goals

  • A role model for positive recovery behaviors

  • Provide peer support services