Whether selling homemade jam, running a school, or delivering peer support programs, ensuring success has a lot to do with knowing where you want to be. Knowing if you are getting close means you need to know where you are and if you are heading in what you consider to be the right direction. Obviously, every peer support organisation will be wanting to build the individual capacity of their peer members via the peer programs they offer. But what specifically is the key outcome they are trying to achieve? Where exactly do they want to be?
The Vision of a peer organisation tells us where they want to arrive at in the future. For example, VALID ‘is committed to the vision of an Australian nation in which people with a disability are empowered to exercise their rights – as human beings and as citizens – in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities’. The Vision of Families4Families peer support network is ‘by 2020 anyone impacted by acquired brain injury and their families will live their best lives supported by our nationally recognised, leading-edge peer support programs’. The Vision is really a stated view of where the organisation hopes to arrive at in the future.
The Mission of peer organisations tells us more about how they want to get where they want to be. Down Syndrome NSW works with and represents ‘people with Down syndrome to help them achieve their full potential in all life stages’. In the Families4Families peer support network, the Mission is to ‘assist people with acquired brain injury and their families to build resilience and live a good life’. This is due to the acquired nature of brain injury, and the need for its members to ‘bounce back’ from their change in abilities and learn to embrace new life opportunities and options. VALID ‘strives to realise its vision through a range of strategies that work to empower people with disabilities to become the leaders of their own lives’. As you can see, peer support missions are varied. Yet all are founded on a shared belief in the rights of people living with disability for full inclusion and maximum life options to enable their members to direct and star in their own lives. The Mission tells us how the peer organisation is going to arrive at their Vision, their desired destination.