Senior Peer Counseling Program

The Senior Peer Counseling Program utilizes Intensively trained volunteer counselors, age 55 or above, to support distressed older adults in a three-county area. These counselors act as mentors, coaches, and advocates, often drawing from their own life experience to help the persons they serve to cope with life changes, to experience personal growth, and to improve quality of life. Counselors visit clients in their own homes or in alternative living environments (including nursing homes), usually for an hour a week; "supportive mentoring" may include close consultation on such challenges as depression, loss, loneliness, substance abuse, retirement "shock," grief, and adjustment needs arising from relocation or physical decline. The program also maintains a resource center providing books, educational videotapes, professional journals, and article reprints.

The mentoring process is designed to help clients work through feelings and emotions, to recognize strengths and coping skills, and to redirect life toward greater meaning and purpose.

In 2001, the program averaged 25 referrals each month. Counselors work each year with more than 100 clients in Marion, Polk, and Yamhill counties. Seventy volunteers are serving in the three-county area.