Thank you, Jody.

First up, we have Scott Zimmerman and friends here from Heartland Family Service Peer Center to discuss everything that Heartland, I shouldn't say everything, a lot of what the Peer Center does and present to the council.

So, Scott, if you want to come forward.

You just need to push the microphone once so it turns green.

Fantastic.

Great.

Thank you.

I have some handouts to just give it basically the same information and an invitation to our art show.

So I expect everyone to be there.

I will be there, Scott.

It's already on my calendar.

Wonderful.

So I wrote something.

I usually will just ramble and I can ramble and ramble for a long time, so I'm going to try to stay on track.

Thank you, Mayor Schudak, for visiting the Peer Center and for the invitation to present before the City Council.

And thank you to the council for the opportunity to share what Heartland Family Service and the Peer Center do in this community.

Before I talk about the Peer Center, I want to share something personal because it frames the perspective from which much of this work was built.

I was born and raised in Omaha and educated at Jesuit institutions for high school, undergraduate, and graduate school.

Primarily because I never felt as though I could relate to most other people, like I didn't fit in.

This was a feeling I struggled with from early in my life and persisted for decades.

After college, while beginning graduate school, I injured my knee and had surgery.

And yet I continued.

Fortunately, I had the means, the support, the education, and the purpose to find my way out.

2026 marks 20 years of being free of opiates.

Two years after getting off of opiates, I was hired by Heartland Family Service, where I've been employed in the community of Council Bluffs.

And it reframed everything.

People often use substances to manage symptoms they don't have words for yet.

The mental health piece is frequently invisible until someone has been in recovery long enough and stable enough to see it clearly.

Most of which now operate out of the Peer Center.

Likewise, in 2008, collaboration amongst community partners was virtually non-existent.

Whereas today it is seen as fundamental.

I can say what exists in Council Bluffs is truly unique.

In October of 2018, we were given the opportunity to take over the Peer Center, which had been operated by CHI for roughly 10 years.

We knew we wanted to take it in a different direction.

From the beginning, our goal was to make it a collaborative one stop space for people experiencing behavioral health barriers.

We invited all of our community and interagency partners to participate.

Council Bluff's Police Department, Iowa Legal Aid Connections, Area on the Aging, Housing Services, and dozens of other agencies over the past eight years.

We wanted to create a lively, welcoming and energetic space.

The heart and soul of the Peer Center, staffed by peer support specialists and peer recovery coaches, people with lived experience with mental health and substance use, offer groups and a non-judgmental presence walking alongside people in their own recovery of experience, their own experience of recovery.

Sorry.

Our members range from people who are stably housed, employed, and engaged in treatment to people living on the streets who aren't ready for clinical services.

We are low barrier.

Anyone with a behavioral health diagnosis is welcome.

We know that when people have a space where they are accepted without judgment, where no one tells them you can't be here, they are far more likely to eventually engage in services.

Every day we also see other agencies and programs meeting with meeting with people in the Peer Center.

It is truly a community space in the most pure way.

Currently, we also have two supervisors, myself and Michaela, who are trainers for the Iowa Peer Workforce Collaborative, the entity responsible for training peer support specialists in the state of Iowa.

One of the three original programs outside of Peer Support we offered was InShape, and InShape is an evidence-based program out of Dartmouth focused on physical health and community integration.

Participants work one to two times a week with a personal health mentor toward towards goals they set for themselves, with community integration, most commonly through the YMCA as a central component.

This program matters not only because of the relationship between physical health and mental well-being, but because people living with severe mental health diagnoses die on average 20 to 30 years younger than those without one.

We originally started with called Intensive Psychiatric Rehab, also an evidence-based model out of Boston University.

This is a long-term skill building and goal setting program where participants identify personal goals related to housing, education, socialization, and employment, and then work through identifying, achieving, and maintaining those goals over two years.

This happens through a combination of group work and individual sessions with an IPR-trained practitioner, totaling of anywhere between four to 10 hours a week.

Most of this takes place in the community.

And the Peer Center has one of the largest IPO IPR programs in the state.

In 2019, we launched our community support program, and it is one of the most flexible community-based case management programs available.

We work with people on virtually any goal they identify, ranging from independent living, skill building, housing, employment, symptom management, connection to other services, and more.

We also now currently have a therapist on site at the Peer Center.

She is fully licensed and primarily does behavioral health evaluations, which wasn't the plan, but we have a lot of people walking through the doors who need them.

So she also does a lot of crisis intervention work and runs some groups.