Unclear job descriptions & scope
Role ambiguity, and drift toward clinical tasks the peer role does not cover.
About MAPS
The case, the model, and who holds it accountable.
The full argument in one place. Start anywhere — the three parts stand on their own.
Why We Exist
MAPS was created by someone who saw the gap from inside it.
Maryland asks a great deal of its peer workforce — training hours, supervised practice, a code of ethics — carried by people doing that work alongside their own recovery. What it does not provide is anywhere independent to turn when the workplace itself is the problem.
That gap is structural, not accidental. In Maryland the bodies that hold a peer’s certification are also, in practice, the bodies a peer would have to raise a concern about. Anyone weighing whether to speak up is weighing it against their credential, and therefore their livelihood. Most decide the risk is not worth it — and the problems stay invisible, which is exactly why they persist.
MAPS exists to be the place that is not those bodies: independent by structure rather than by promise, and built with peers rather than on their behalf.
Mission
Our mission
Maryland Advocates for Peer Support strengthens Maryland’s peer-support workforce through research and training — establishing what the workforce is and what it needs, and convening the training that closes the gaps the research finds.
MAPS advocates through evidence. Advocacy is also one of the four peer recovery domains the Maryland credential is built on, and it is one of the things MAPS helps peers train in. MAPS does not take individual complaints or represent peers in disputes.
Vision
Our vision
A Maryland in which Peer Recovery Specialists are recognized as skilled professionals, with a clear path to the credentials the work requires and the training to walk it — and where decisions about the workforce are made with evidence the workforce helped produce.
01
Baltimore City Pilot
Prove the model where the need is most concentrated and the workforce is most reachable.
02
Regional Expansion
Extend to surrounding jurisdictions once protocols and referral networks are tested.
03
Statewide Impact
Carry validated standards and workforce data into statewide policy conversations.
Proposed MAPS model — subject to community validation, legal review, and partnership agreements.
The Case Why an independent body is needed: what Maryland asks of peer workers, and what it does not give them in return.
The People Behind the Recovery Workforce
Skilled professionals, not simply volunteers.
Peer Recovery Specialists combine lived experience with formal preparation, ethical practice, and systems knowledge — making recovery systems more human, credible, and accessible through professional nonclinical support.
The role is often described as though it were informal companionship. In practice it is a defined scope of work with its own competencies, its own ethical code, and its own supervision requirements. A peer specialist is expected to hold professional boundaries, document appropriately, recognize when a situation exceeds their scope, and refer accurately — while carrying the particular weight of doing that work alongside their own recovery.
- System advocacy
- Resource linkage
- Mentoring & support
- Goal setting
- Social support
- System navigation
National Trend
A workforce that has more than doubled.
173%
Increase in certified peer support specialists nationwide over the last decade — from 30,000 to 82,000.
The peer workforce is no longer an experiment at the edge of behavioral health. It has become a structural part of how recovery services are delivered, and the research base has grown alongside it.
Research associations
- Lower inpatient utilization and costs
- Greater hope and quality of life
- Higher service engagement
Source: SAMHSA, “Peer Support Specialists: A Growing Mental Health and Addictions Workforce,” PEP24-08-005, 2024. Clinical associations are presented as research-linked outcomes, not guaranteed local results.
The Structural Gap
Maryland’s workforce: growing, rigorous, thinly spread.
Maryland certifies a substantial peer workforce and asks a great deal of it. On a per-capita basis the state sits in the bottom third of the national field — below the median state, and far behind the leaders.
579
MABPCB-certified peer specialists statewide.
MABPCB, October 2023 — most recent published count
9.4
Per 100,000 residents — in the bottom third nationally.
Census population ÷ MABPCB count — compared below
System expectations — CPRS rigor
- 50 hours of peer-specific education and ethics
- 500 supervised service hours within two years
- Minimum 30 hours of recovery peer supervision
- Strict adherence to ethical conduct and confidentiality
- Navigation of complex clinical and service systems
These are meaningful professional thresholds. The question this initiative asks is a simple one: if the system expects this much of a peer specialist, what does the peer specialist get in return when something goes wrong?
Source: Peer Recovery Center of Excellence, “National Distribution of Certified Peer Support Specialists in the U.S.” (2024), data collected Aug 2023–Jul 2024 — Maryland: 579 certified, reported by MABPCB 9 Oct 2023. Per-capita figures are that count divided by 2023 U.S. Census state population: 579 ÷ 6,180,253 × 100,000 = 9.4 per 100,000. CPRS requirements per MABPCB, current as of the 1 September 2025 revision.
The Structural Gap
Rising requirements, static training supply.
While professional requirements have intensified, what is available to help peers meet them has not kept pace. Certification raised the bar; the ladder to reach it was never built to match, and almost nothing is published about where it is missing.
Critical workforce needs
- Affordable, scheduled routes to the required training hours
- Preparation across all four credential domains, not only the accessible ones
- Continuing education that fits shift work and hourly pay
- Digital skills the job now assumes and the curriculum does not cover
- Local data on what employers actually require and reward
Sources: Bell et al., “Workforce outcomes among substance use peer supports: a scoping review of individual and organizational influences,” Frontiers in Public Health, 2025 · Maryland HB 886 (2026), which requires the Maryland Department of Health to convene a workgroup on the CPRS certification process. The training-supply needs listed here are MAPS’s own position, to be tested through the Baltimore needs assessment.
Questions the Research Will Test
What we do not yet know.
These are the things MAPS has heard informally and intends to measure formally through the Baltimore workforce needs assessment. They are listed here as questions to test, not as findings.
Supervision that does not develop skill
Supervision that is missing entirely, or delivered by someone unfamiliar with recovery-supportive practice.
Underpayment or misclassification
Work performed beyond the paid role, or a job title that does not match the duties actually assigned.
Training that costs more than a shift pays
Required hours priced or scheduled beyond what a peer on an hourly wage can reach.
No clear route through the four domains
Advocacy, mentoring and education, recovery and wellness support, ethical responsibility — and no local map of where to get the hours.
Digital systems nobody trained for
Documentation, telehealth and records platforms the job assumes and the training does not cover.
The Recovery Capital Principle
The workforce spends the thing it runs on.
Peer support works because the person providing it has lived what the person receiving it is living. That lived experience is not a credential earned once and kept — it rests on a recovery that has to be actively maintained. Recovery research calls the resources that maintenance draws on recovery capital: health and hope, relationships and community, stable housing and income, identity and belonging. In peer support that capital is at once the worker’s own foundation and the instrument of the work. No other role in behavioral health asks a person to spend their own recovery as a professional resource.
Supporting others draws it down
Holding other people’s crises, working close to one’s own history, and being asked to disclose that history on demand all cost something. Recovery-informed supervision is what replenishes it. Supervision that is absent, or delivered by someone unfamiliar with peer practice, does not.
Poor conditions drain it faster
Underpayment erodes the economic stability recovery rests on. Unclear scope pulls peers toward clinical tasks that are not theirs. Retaliation for raising a concern removes the safety that makes speaking up survivable. Each of the conditions listed above is a withdrawal from the same account the work depends on.
A changing workforce raises the stakes
Certification, integration into clinical teams and grant-funded posts have brought recognition, structure and pay. They also bring role drift, funding cycles that end, and pressure to look less like a peer and more like staff. Professionalization without protection asks peers to carry more while holding less.
Protecting peers is therefore not a welfare question sitting beside the service model. It is maintenance of the asset the model runs on. A workforce whose recovery capital is being depleted does not deliver peer support for long.
“Recovery capital” is a term from recovery research, introduced by Granfield and Cloud (1999) and developed since in the peer support and recovery-oriented systems of care literature. The application to workforce conditions set out here is MAPS’s own framing, and is among the propositions the Baltimore workforce needs assessment is designed to test.
The Model What MAPS would do — six functions across research and training, who teaches what, and the limits that keep it honest.
The Proposed Response
An independent research and training center for Maryland’s peer-support workforce.
Proposed MAPS model — subject to community validation, Maryland counsel review, funding, and partnership agreements.
The MAPS Service Model
Six functions.
Three establish what the workforce is and what it needs. Three deliver the training that answers it. Research decides what gets taught, and what gets taught is measured back against the research.
Research & Evidence
Workforce Census & Conditions
Who the peer workforce is, where it works, what it earns, and how it is classified. Maryland publishes almost none of this.
Training Demand & Gap Analysis
Which skills, credentials and hours peers actually need — and which of those are unavailable, unaffordable or simply never scheduled in Baltimore.
Workforce Standards & Open Data
Model job descriptions, supervision standards and compensation guidance, published openly rather than held as leverage.
Training & Progression
CPRS Domain Preparation
Preparation across the four peer recovery domains the credential is built on: Advocacy, Mentoring and Education, Recovery / Wellness Support, and Ethical Responsibility.
Mental Health First Aid & WRAP
Convened and funded by MAPS, taught by certified partners. MAPS organises and pays for the seat; it does not hold the certification.
Digital Literacy
The practical skills the job now assumes: documentation systems, telehealth platforms, secure records, and the software an employer expects on day one.
Who actually teaches what
Mental Health First Aid is administered by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing and may only be taught by instructors it certifies. WRAP is administered by the Copeland Center for Wellness and Recovery and may only be facilitated by facilitators it certifies. MAPS holds neither certification and does not claim to. Its role is to find where the demand is, then convene, fund and fill the sessions that certified partners deliver. Where a training is already available and affordable, MAPS refers rather than duplicates.
Function 03 builds on the national framework rather than starting over. SAMHSA published National Model Standards for Peer Support Certification in 2023, covering foundational, ethical and training standards across mental health, substance use and family peer support. MAPS takes those as the baseline and adds what they deliberately leave to states and employers: local compensation and classification data, model supervision and job descriptions for Baltimore, and the training-supply picture that certification standards do not reach.
Subject to community validation, Maryland counsel review and funding.
Scope & Referral Boundary
What MAPS is not.
Defining the limits protects peers as much as it protects MAPS. A peer who is told clearly what MAPS cannot do is a peer who does not lose time finding out.
Not a complaints service
MAPS does not take complaints, navigate grievances, or support anyone through a disciplinary or ethics process. That is not a service it is building at present.
Who does — your employer’s HR process; MABPCB for credential ethics; the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights for discrimination.
Not a law firm
MAPS does not give legal advice, does not represent anyone, and does not tell a peer which claim they have or which deadline applies to them.
Who does — pro bono counsel, Maryland legal aid, private attorneys.
Not a union
MAPS does not bargain collectively, negotiate contracts, or represent employees in labor proceedings.
Who does — labor organizations. MAPS produces evidence, not bargaining positions.
Not a credentialing body
MAPS issues no credentials and sets no certification standards. It prepares peers for a credential that somebody else awards.
Who does — MABPCB, which issues the voluntary CPRS credential.
Not the trainer of record
For Mental Health First Aid and WRAP, MAPS convenes, funds and fills the session. The teaching is done by instructors and facilitators certified by the bodies that own those programs.
Who does — National Council for Mental Wellbeing (MHFA); Copeland Center (WRAP).
Not a clinical service
MAPS provides no diagnosis, treatment, therapy, or crisis response.
Who does — licensed providers; 988 for crisis support.
Operating Rule
MAPS names the body that certifies every training it convenes, and does not present a partner’s credential as its own. Research findings are published whether or not they suit a funder.
Scope boundaries and the referral panel are subject to Maryland counsel review before services begin.
The Independence Principle
Collaborative independence.
MAPS operates alongside — not beneath — established institutions. We maintain a strict firewall between paid technical assistance for employers and the independence of what MAPS publishes.
Partnership without institutional capture.
Governance How peer control is guaranteed rather than promised, and what prevents an advocacy body from being captured by the people it advocates to.
Structure
Governance built for trust.
60%
Minimum peer majority — a floor in the adopted bylaws.
Independence is easy to claim and hard to prove. The way MAPS proposes to prove it is structural: peers hold the majority, and that majority is written into the governing documents rather than left to the goodwill of whoever is in the room.
While a fiscal sponsor is in place, aspects of fiduciary and financial control sit with the sponsor under terms still being set with counsel. The 60% peer floor is written into the MAPS bylaws and is not contingent on that arrangement; where the sponsor holds control of funds, peer authority operates through the board and a steering committee with defined consultation rights.
Inclusive representation
- Baltimore City frontline peers
- LGBTQIA+ and diversity inclusion
- Mental health and substance use
- Justice-impacted pathways
Supporting expertise
- Labor law
- Ethics and compliance
- Nonprofit HR
- Fiscal management
- Behavioral health
Organizational members cannot control peer elections or the findings MAPS publishes. Subject to community validation.
Structure
Operational safeguards.
Each safeguard exists because there is a specific way an advocacy organization can be captured, and this is the mechanism that prevents it.
Conflicts & Recusal
Rigorous standards to prevent institutional capture and bias in what MAPS studies and publishes.
Confidentiality
Secure data protocols protecting peer recovery and employment information.
Anti-Retaliation
Whistleblower protections for peers who report unsafe or unethical conditions to MAPS, including through its research.
Dual-Rep Prohibition
Prevents conflicting representation between employers and employees.
Funder Independence
Diversified revenue ensures no single entity can influence advocacy outcomes.
Peer-Majority Bylaws
Adopted in the MAPS bylaws: a 60% peer board floor that cannot be altered without peer consensus. Where a fiscal sponsor holds control of funds, it also operates through a steering-committee majority.
“Peer leadership protected by design, not left to intention.”
What Next
