The Power of Youth Peer Support: Learnings from on stage and behind the curtain

BHT Impact is a fiscally sponsored project of Moore Impact, a 501(c)3 public charity.

Note: This article is intended for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical, clinical, or legal advice. Organizations developing youth mental health programs should consult appropriate professionals and applicable regulations.

Link to the panel recording

I started writing this piece to share the biggest things I learned after six phenomenal leaders, advocates, and experts (and now friends!) in youth peer support took their seats under the dazzling lights of the main stage at the Behavioral Health Tech 2026 Conference in Nashville.

Don’t get it twisted: Authentic Connection: The Power of Youth Peer Support in a Digital and AI-Enabled World did not disappoint. I sat in the front row, beaming up at the panel, microphones in hand, while waves of pride, gratitude, and excited energy rolled over me.

But the real recap here is not just about what happened in that auditorium. It’s about the work and intentions that were set long before anyone took that stage. I’m going to tell you both.

Act I: Behind the Curtain

Scene 1: Youth using AI for mental health support is a signal. Let’s follow where it leads. 

Young people are turning to AI for mental health support at alarming rates. Longstanding gaps in youth mental health service availability, access, and quality are painfully obvious culprits at this point, but they aren’t the whole story. Youth also turn to general-purpose GenAI chatbots because they feel misunderstood by the people around them, fear being vulnerable, or have no human support available.

Of course, this is a challenge worth addressing. That said, I had a hunch that the trend itself was a clue, pointing toward a safe, evidence-based intervention that could meet those same needs instead. That hunch was peer support.

Since I’m data obsessed, I knew testing this hunch meant going straight to the source. Across conversations with researchers, policy advocates, innovators, founders, organizational leaders, and, most importantly, youth peers with lived experience, one thing was clear: young people are seeking nonjudgmental validation, connection, and community. Lucky for us, peer support represents a perfect fit for that need. 

What was less clear was whether the youth mental health space is ready to value peer support and the young people who lead it with our money and not just our words, and with the same enthusiasm we give to technology.  

Scene 2: Standing on business centering youth in session design and intention

One thing about us at BHT Impact, we’re going to practice what we preach around here. For this conversation to be authentic, I knew we needed to center lived experience as expertise and highlight youth leadership. So we brought together three pairs of panelists, each from a nonprofit deeply engaged in peer support and standing on business when it comes to centering youth voices. The pairs included a youth leader and an organizational leader. We packed that stage. Because we understand that having youth voices is plural, and no single youth should be made to speak on behalf of others or tokenized. Each person on the panel had a lead role. 

And ya’ll, the cast was chef’s kiss. No notes. 

• Self-Injury Recovery and Awareness (SIRA) is a non-profit dedicated to helping people recover from self-injury through peer led virtual support meetings and educational resources. Amanda Beausoleil, SIRAs founder and Executive Director and Mo Milner, SIRAs Community Engagement Manager teamed up to speak to lived experience as expertise and to advocate for awareness, public understanding and funding for peer support for people who self-injure.  

• Mental Health America (MHA) is a national nonprofit dedicated to helping all people live mentally healthier lives through education, advocacy, support and services. MHA treats peer support as essential to thriving communities, recovery and wellbeing. Their peer support portfolio is pretty stacked, but for the sake of time, we focused on the Youth Policy Accelerator (YPA), a leadership program that helps fellows build the experience they need to advance youth peer support policy. Kelly Davis, SVP of Programs and Technical Assistance and Isaac Lara a Fellow from YPA, spoke to the policy and advocacy lens, including the need for youth and people with lived experience to be at the table when policy is written.

• Nunchi Health is a nonprofit dedicated to advancing mental health equity for young people, especially those from immigrant and minority communities. Their programs teach young people peer-to-peer support skills so they can be of service and teach others, and they have trained over 100 youth facilitators to deliver culturally competent workshops in schools and youth centers. Andrew Chang, the founder and CEO of Nunchi and Roja Yousef, one of their trained peers, shared their expertise in tailoring peer support to diverse communities, and building in and protecting nonjudgemental third spaces.

Together, these pairs showed how many forms peer support can take, from informal peer-to-peer models to trained, certified peer specialists. They also showed what all of those forms share: connection at the core, lives changed, and a clear-eyed view of the role technology should play. And every last one of them spoke to the need to back peer support with intentional investment.

Just as importantly, these panelists shaped the session and its intention themselves. Don’t get me wrong. I came to our first digital convening in the summer with some ideas for the group to react to. We were all but five minutes in before I scrapped the document and we were deep in discussion about how we wanted people to feel and understand when they left, not only what we wanted them to know. That intention guided the group as they wrote their own questions to ask and answer. It also meant letting them self-moderate and steer their own discussion once we hit the big stage, which meant I stayed off it and in the front row.

ACT 2: The Big Stage

I’m really tempted to give you a frame-by-frame recap, but I’ll show some restraint and share the major themes that showed up on stage, with a few details from our dress rehearsal and planning sessions.

Scene 1: You don’t need something shiny to have impact

Peer support is not new. In fact, it may be the oldest form of help we have: people who have been there showing up for each other. The discussion pointed out that we keep chasing shiny things when the supports that help the most are not all that expensive. In a mic drop moment, Amanda called peer support “...part of the fabric of our humanity” and urged us to get back to basics, and back to our human selves. “...we’ve been doing this since the dawn of time, sitting around the campfire sharing stories. Stories are soul.” she said.

Because it is natural, informal forms of peer support are already happening in the day-to-day lives of youth, and they may not even realize that they’re doing it. Isaac Lara couldn’t have underscored this better when he offered that “youth peer support is a pretty name for something young people have been doing for years.” If we could harness that natural tendency and wrap resources around it, there is tremendous potential there. 

And here is the part that is easy to miss. Peer support does not only help the person receiving it. It changes the person providing it, too. Young people who are supported often come to see themselves not just as someone who needs help, but as someone capable of helping and leading others. 

Scene 2: Technology is a bridge, not an enemy

Let me be clear: nobody on this panel was anti-technology. The issue that got me curious at the beginning was never about human versus machine. In fact, according to peer-reviewed research discussed (shout out to Kelly Davis!), when we explore the content of youth conversations with LLMs around mental health, the discussion tends to mirror many of the core competencies that peer support is built on. We just need to ensure that youth have a safe, evidence-based alternative rather than a non-purpose built chatbot to have those critical conversations. 

During the panel, the discussion made it clear that there is a real opportunity for us to use technology to bring people together. It was how we use technology to bring people together.  Roja highlighted this beautifully when she said “LLMs should be used as a bridge to connect us to that next person, the human. We want to see the success of you [young people] getting off the platform to get human interaction and connection. 

Actually, despite working closely together and being in deep community with one another in their work, Andrew and Roja had never met in person until the conference (I got to be there when they hugged!!!) but were connected digitally. 

Ultimately, as was raised by the group and underscored by Andrew Chang who said that "Peer support is coming one way or another.” Technology can shape how peer support arrives, and youth leaders and people with lived experience should be at the forefront of helping to build those pathways. 

Scene 3: Nothing about us without us because “it’s not just a dignity issue. It’s an issue of positionality.”- Kelly Davis

Youth co-design in shaping not only the technology, but the infrastructure and policy that will surround evidence-based innovations and solutions like peer support must be evergreen. Period. “As youth, you’re looking for the permission to take that passion and ignited spark in these [peer support] programs to find leadership opportunities…you should be building with youth. Youth should be on the panels and executive teams.” 

Moreover, folks building in the youth mental health space should invite and expect youth to keep it real. In fact, “when you feel resistance is when actually you should dig deeper” as was artfully stated by Mo Milner. Innovators should be prepared to critically evaluate who is represented among the voices they consult and those who may be missing. In so doing will have the best opportunity to build what actually works, resonates and meets the needs of a broader array of youth. Issac Lara offered this important challenge saying, “why is it more of the complicit and agreeable young people in these spaces and not the disrupters? I encourage you to branch out of your network and find the most critical voices. Who is being excluded and why?”. 

See what I mean? No notes. 

Curtain Call: “Do you have the courage to bet on the young people who will shape the world?”- Amanda Beausoeil

Here’s the thing: none of this works if we don’t also value it with funding, resources and support. 

“Two things are needed: courage and money,” as was bravely offered by Amanda Beausoleil. In other words, show us the money. Rather than leaving youth to fend for themselves, we can scaffold and support their natural tendency to want to care for one another by providing the funding needed for training. 

From where I sat behind the curtain, and in the audience, it was clear to me that young people are already showing us what they need. The question for the rest of us is what we’re willing to commit to to help them get there.