and so is the incredible work being done by Peer Support Professionals across Colorado. Whether you're facilitating groups, navigating systems, advocating for participants, supporting families, building recovery communities, or simply showing up one conversation at a time, your impact matters.

Here's a quick look at what's happening across our peer community this month:

🌱 BRANCH Spotlight
This month's BRANCH gathering takes a slightly different approach as we open our doors for a special Recovery Ambassador Training. While Peer Support Professionals can earn COPA-approved continuing education credits, we're also excited to welcome peer-curious community members interested in learning more about recovery, advocacy, stigma reduction, and sharing hope in their communities.

🎓 Workforce Development
Peer Supervisor Training registration is now open for July. As our workforce continues to grow, strong peer-centered leadership remains critical to sustaining ethical, effective, and values-driven support services.

🤝 PSP ECHO Continues to Grow
Every Friday morning, Peer Support Professionals from across Colorado gather to share challenges, successes, resources, and real-world experiences from the front lines. Thank you to everyone helping make ECHO a space where connection consistently outweighs competition.

📣 Community Highlights
This month, we're celebrating the organizations, programs, and peer leaders creating more inclusive, affirming, and accessible spaces throughout Colorado. If your organization has news, events, achievements, or milestones you'd like featured in a future edition, we'd love to hear from you.

help spread the word about these exciting opportunities to connect, celebrate, and strengthen our communities this month.

🎤 Recovery's Got Talent - June 26, 2026
Recovery's Got Talent returns as a celebration of creativity, courage, and lived experience. From music and poetry to spoken word and other artistic talents, this event showcases the incredible gifts that exist throughout Colorado's recovery community. Recovery is more than abstinence, treatment, or diagnosis. It is expression, connection, joy, and the freedom to share our stories in ways that inspire others.

Whether you're performing, cheering on participants, or simply curious to see the talent within our community, we encourage you to join us for an evening of hope, authenticity, and celebration.

🏳️‍🌈 Denver PrideFest - June 27, 2026
One of Colorado's largest celebrations of LGBTQIA+ community, visibility, and advocacy returns this month in the heart of Denver. PrideFest offers opportunities to connect with community organizations, support local vendors, attend educational events, celebrate identity, and honor the generations of advocates who helped create the freedoms many enjoy today.

For many people in recovery, Pride is about more than celebration. It is about finding community, building chosen family, and being reminded that belonging is possible. Whether you're attending for the first time or returning as a longtime participant, we hope you'll find moments of connection, joy, and affirmation throughout the weekend.

💡 Have an Event to Share?
We're always looking to highlight peer-focused trainings, recovery community events, networking opportunities, and LGBTQIA+ community gatherings across Colorado. If you'd like an event featured in a future edition, let us know.

Community Member Spotlight

Carlyle is a trans and queer musician, gardener, hiker, and peer support professional who has been in active and sustained recovery for over 7 years. They have worked in behavioral healthcare as a CPFS and AAT for over 3 years with Rocky Mountain Equality, serving other LGBTQ+ folks through direct engagement services and advocacy. They focus on building strong community connections and collaborations with partners to better serve marginalized communities in CO. Carlyle is dedicated to providing quality care for people needing mental health and recovery support and plans to go back to school for their MSW in the next few years. Since moving to CO in 2020, Carlyle continues to grow both personally and professionally, with a strong support system and creative outlets that help aid them in their long-term sobriety and in the field of behavioral healthcare. 

Peer professionals spend so much time helping others feel seen, heard, and valued that we can forget to extend that same grace to ourselves.

This month, we invite you to consider self-care not as another task on your to-do list, but as an act of belonging.

✨ Conduct a Boundary Check
Ask yourself: What am I saying "yes" to that should be a "not right now"? Healthy boundaries protect our energy and allow us to show up more authentically in the spaces that matter most.

✨ Find Your People
Connection is protective. Reach out to a trusted friend, fellow peer, mentor, recovery support, or chosen family member. A quick text, phone call, coffee date, or walk can make a bigger impact than we often realize.

✨ Take a Break From Performing
Notice where you may be masking, people-pleasing, or shrinking yourself to make others comfortable. Consider one place this week where you can show up a little more honestly.

✨ Celebrate Small Wins
Recovery, healing, growth, and professional development rarely happen through giant breakthroughs. More often, they happen through small, consistent steps. Take a moment to acknowledge something you've done well recently, no matter how ordinary it may seem.

✨ Create Space for Joy
Joy is not a reward for surviving hard things. It is part of sustaining ourselves through them. Listen to a favorite song, spend time outdoors, laugh with a friend, cuddle a pet, make art, dance badly in your kitchen, or do whatever reminds you that you are more than your responsibilities.

As Peer Support Professionals, we often remind others that they matter. Consider this your reminder that you matter, too.

Keep showing up, keep cheering each other on — and as always, stand in your authenticity! 🌈🏳️‍🌈