Background and Introduction to PAN Resources

 

One of the common agendas for the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA)’s Collective Impact Network (CIN) was to center the voices of people with lived and living experiences in both programming and policy development. In the summer of 2023, CIN identified the need to have a comprehensive guide to support community-based organizations (CBOs) in BC to effectively employ peers (or people with equal standing in a community who shares a common lived experience. Given the complex and evolving challenges in areas like HIV, hepatitis C, and harm reduction, the CIN adopted a unique literature strategy to search, scan, and analyze relevant, contextual, and community-informed knowledge on peer engagement. This resulted in a thorough collection of 120+ peer-reviewed papers, and grey literatures including white papers, reports, and other relevant materials. They offer both theoretical and practical insights into effective practices, policies, and principles for peer engagement and employment within CBOs.

CIN members, representing seven organizations, participated in reviewing the full text of select articles (about a third) and extracting data in the form of an annotated bibliography. The selection process prioritized regional knowledge generated from BC and contextual knowledge in the form of reports and white papers from community-based organizations, research, and advocacy groups, with an emphasis on those that were published after 2010. Each bibliography entry summarizes the article, highlights key findings, and outlines practical implications for its implementation. In 2024, PAN reworked the annotated bibliography into this searchable online database. Lower priority resources were included and listed simply with titles and links.

Please note that the summaries and key findings have been compiled focusing on guiding principles, practices, and policies for engaging people with lived and living experiences in CBOs. As such, they do not offer a comprehensive overview of each article. We recognize that many aspects of these articles are not covered, which is why we added the link to the original article to allow for deeper study.