ABOUT
Cautious Optimism means hoping for and working toward positive outcomes, while anticipating and preparing ourselves for inevitable and realistic challenges. Peer Education and Support means we are equals, learning and processing together from a space of shared lived experiences in mental health, addiction, neurodiversity, disability, loss, institutional trauma and surviving late capitalism with intersectional identities.
We are a small crew of neurodivergent, queer folks who aim to provide safe spaces for our community members to process and ask for support. We aim to ask share the resources, tools and skills we have ach acquired in our own individual experiences of healing and recovery. We are certified Peer Support Specialists in Oregon, but will continue to emphasize and return to the ethos that each person is the expert in their own experience, and we are only here to meet you there in solidarity.
Our work exists and is carried out with the express purpose of subverting an inherently violent "mental health" system that enacts mental traumas and abuses on the mentally ill, neurodiverse and disabled communities it claims to support. We do not support or condone involuntary hospitalization or crisis intervention and believe each person knows what their unique needs are, and they are to be trusted. We believe in the abolition and dismantling of a health system that seeks to imprison us against our will, cutting us off from community, in generally distressing, foreign and unsafe settings and claim it is healing us, we believe in reclamation of the narrative around madness by and for the mentally ill ourselves.
We recognize, and are forever grateful that our work is done on the indigenous lands of the Multnomah, Cowlitz, Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla and Grand Ronde, Siletz, Mollalla, Clackamas, Klickitat, Kalapuya, Clatskanie, Cascades, and Nahalem peoples. Land Back to the Indigenous Peoples!
We stand in loud and fierce solidarity with our BIPOC and marginalized communities in Portland and around the world, in our collective work and movement for meaningful racial justice, to end institutionalized and socialized racism in all its forms and to abolish and reimagine the inherently, blatantly racist police system in the United States.
We recognize, and are forever grateful that our work is done on the indigenous lands of the Multnomah, Cowlitz, Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla and Grand Ronde, Siletz, Mollalla, Clackamas, Klickitat, Kalapuya, Clatskanie, Cascades, and Nahalem peoples. Land Back to the Indigenous Peoples!
We stand in loud and fierce solidarity with our BIPOC and marginalized communities in Portland and around the world, in our collective work and movement for meaningful racial justice, to end institutionalized and socialized racism in all its forms and to abolish and reimagine the inherently, blatantly racist police system in the United States.