About Us

Western Canada Peer Training Society is a registered charity which serves to promote social wellness and education by providing tuition bursaries that go toward peer support training within Calgary and Western Canada. 

Our Phase 1 goal was to solicit community funding to provide bursaries to financially barriered learners. These bursaries helped reduce the financial burden that many peers faced and enabled them to participate in training opportunities that would have otherwise been out of reach for them. To date, WCPTS has awarded bursaries to 36 peers.

Putting Training to Work

Phase 2 extends opportunities to advance peer support work experience thus building individual and community capacity. As evidenced in Phase 1, training bursaries are often not enough to connect a financially barriered learner to a peer support position. Most learners require on-the-job experience to secure an initial interview and eventually secure a peer supporter role. This vicious cycle isolates peers and stagnates their learning and growing process. We are expanding a peers’ learning continuum to include a 50-hour mentored Practicum. We are surveying trained peer supporters who received bursaries last year to ascertain their interest and availability to access a Practicum placement. Bursaries this term will be utilized to create, support and sustain mentored

community placements.

We envision that the community will experience the transformational benefits of trained peers through reduced stigma, increased societal acceptance of people living with mental health concerns, improved stability of graduates who model the effectiveness of the training in their own lives and with those around them and decreased overall health costs as peers share amongst themselves strategies that have improved their overall health thereby improving that of their community at large.

It is through the generosity of individual donors and the vision of funding organizations  that we will be able to make a difference for anyone who is dealing with a mental health concern.

Tax receipts are available for donations of $20 or more. Please consider giving today!

https://www.canadahelps.org/en/dn/58412