I’m Courtney and I work as the Regional Peer Workforce Program Lead at COORDINARE - South Eastern NSW PHN, where I lead the peer workforce development strategy across South Eastern NSW.

My work focuses on growing a strong, sustainable peer workforce by strengthening networks and opportunities for peer workers, supporting organisations to embed peer roles well, influencing commissioning and helping to shape the systems, cultures and leadership needed for lived experience to thrive. 

I created Peers at the Table because I’ve spent years sitting in rooms where decisions are made about people without creating enough space to hear from and learn from them. I’ve often seen lived experience reduced to a story, a consultation, or a single perspective, when in reality it offers a rich body of knowledge about relationships, power, systems and what it truly means to inspire hope for recovery.

This vodcast is an invitation to slow those conversations down. Rather than asking people to share what happened to them, I’m interested in amplifying what they’ve learned, how that knowledge has evolved and what it can teach us all about creating more human systems. 

I hope listeners come away seeing lived and living experience differently. Not only as a personal story that adds colour to a conversation, but as a form of expertise that changes the conversation itself.

I hope each episode invites people to think more deeply, question some of the assumptions we’ve inherited about mental health and recovery and leave with practical ideas and fresh perspectives for what becomes possible when people with lived and living experience are genuinely at the table.