User-Led Recovery and Support

Overview

• Romagder is a regional user-led organization in mental health, substance abuse, and violence.
• Focuses on promoting user participation and the recovery perspective.
• Believes recovery means each person is more than their pain and has a unique path.
• Emphasizes combining professional expertise with lived experience on the same team.

Services and Activities

• Operates a user steering center in Kristiansand for 20 years to empower users and relatives.
• Maintains a central center with course rooms, offices, and meeting rooms.
• Offers training for course leaders, peer-group courses, professional days, and low-threshold recovery training.
• Runs weekly "kitchen" meetings as conversation and peer support spaces.
• Trains kitchen-talk leaders and volunteers for mental health organizations.
• Collaborates with Lillesand Resource Center for low-threshold conversations and café meetings.
• Provides local tutors and classroom access for students in experience-consultant education.

Collaboration And Networks

• One of five user-controlled centers in Norway (RBS), supported by the Norwegian Directorate of Health.
• Centers collaborate via a national recovery hub to bridge public services and experienced users.
• Long-term collaboration with University of Agder, supervising social work students.
• Partners include Southern Norway's hospitals, municipal and county employees, politicians, and the Storting.
• Works with FFRA, a multicultural recovery association, to strengthen voices of multicultural groups, refugees, and vulnerable populations.
• Part of a Polish-Norwegian EU project “You Areed.”
• Cooperates with KBT for training experience consultants (higher vocational training using lived experience).

Principles And Approach

• Recovery-oriented practice shares knowledge and tools to foster hope, belonging, identity, and self-determination.
• Prioritizes lived experience equally with professional skills to improve outcomes.
• Aims to be a bridge-builder between evolving disciplines and user experience.
• Produces courses and brochures in several languages to reach diverse communities.

Impact And Goals

• Strengthens user and relative voices in teaching, service development, and research.
• Uses network, expertise, and experience to facilitate community services and inclusion.
• Seeks to ensure innovation and new thinking within mental health and substance abuse fields.
• Goal: remain an ideal actor at individual, service, and societal levels, offering tools for hope, coping, and dignity.

Structured Details

Decisions

• None explicitly stated in the transcript.

Action Items

• None explicitly assigned in the transcript.