This workbook was written for the person who raises their hand.
Maybe you've been asked to help start a peer support team at your center. Maybe no one asked, and you're doing it anyway — because you've watched too many good dispatchers go quiet, go numb, or go home carrying something they never put down.
September is Suicide Awareness Month, and yesterday was 988 Day. There's no better moment to get serious about what peer support in a 911 center actually looks like — not the checkbox version, the real thing.
Who this is for
- Dispatchers and call takers starting (or restarting) a peer support team
- Supervisors and directors deciding who should carry this work
- The informal peer supporter every center already has — the person coworkers find without a title or a badge
What's inside
This isn't a manual on how to run a program by the book. It's a narrative guide built from real conversations, real questionnaires, real training outlines, and real questions people ask when they're standing at the very beginning of building something like this.
- What peer support in 911 actually is — one trained coworker showing up for another: a confidential space, a trained eye for burnout and cumulative stress, a bridge to professional help without judgment, and a culture-level message that asking for help is not the same as being unfit for the job.
- What peer support is not — not therapy, not counseling, not a substitute for a licensed clinician, and never a way to avoid escalating genuine safety concerns. Knowing when to refer someone out isn't a failure of peer support — it's the whole point of doing it responsibly.
- More than a checkbox — the difference between checkbox support ("Do we have a program?") and real support ("Do our people trust it enough to actually use it?"), why people don't reach out even when a team exists, and why you should check on the people who seem the strongest.
- The traits and values worth recruiting for — trustworthiness demonstrated over time, empathy paired with sound judgment, active listening, discretion, self-awareness, humility, and healthy boundaries. Notice what's missing: seniority, rank, and being universally well-liked.
- Building the team — the two documents to put in writing before you recruit a single person (a peer support policy and a team questionnaire, with the actual questions to ask), and why to spend time observing before you formalize anything.
- Training that actually prepares them — core skills plus scenario-based role-play for the conversations that matter most: a coworker expressing suicidal thoughts, processing a traumatic call, disclosing a struggle with drugs or alcohol. Reading about a hard conversation and having one are very different skills — and the console is not the place to discover the gap.
Reflection prompts run throughout, starting with this one: think about the last hard call you took. Who did you talk to about it, and why did you choose them?
The heart of it
"You are not looking for the person everyone likes. You are looking for the person everyone trusts. Those are not always the same person."
The goal of peer support isn't to fix someone. It's to make sure no one has to carry it alone until they can get the help that will.
Download the full workbook below. Read it the way you'd read a conversation with someone a few steps ahead of you on the same path — take what's useful, adapt what needs adapting, and build something that fits your center, your culture, and your people.
If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 — the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — any time, day or night.
