How PeerPlate Works
What is PeerPlate?
The PeerPlate Project is a PhD research project working with professional mental health peer workers in Western Australia to improve food and nutrition literacy within the peer workforce.
PeerPlate is being developed with peer workers, for peer workers. It is not a traditional health education project where experts design a program, consult briefly with stakeholders, and then train workers to deliver it to others. PeerPlate starts from a different place.
This project puts the professional mental health peer workforce at the centre.
It asks how food and nutrition education can be designed in a way that fits peer work: lived experience practice, mutuality, relational support, recovery-oriented practice, and professional peer work boundaries.
Is this for me?
Focus groups are for adults aged 18 years or older in Western Australia with experience or connection to professional mental health peer work or lived experience workforce roles. You do not need to be currently employed or contracted in a peer worker role to express interest in a focus group.
The eligibility criteria for Design Workshops and The PeerPlate Program differ from that of Focus Groups - more informaiton coming soon.
Why focus on peer workers?
Mental health peer workers hold a specific professional role. They are not simply general support workers, and they are not clinicians. Peer workers draw on lived experience of mental health distress, challenges, recovery, and service use in purposeful, boundaried, and professional ways to support others.
Peer work is grounded in relationships. It involves connection, trust, shared understanding, hope, and mutuality. This means peer workers do not work from an expert advice model where one person tells another person what to do. Instead, peer work supports people through connection, lived experience, respect, and self-determination.
This matters for food and nutrition.
Food is not only about information. Food practices are shaped by income, housing, medication, energy, mental health, culture, confidence, food access, cooking facilities, time, support, and daily routines. Knowing what to do is not always the same as being able to do it.
PeerPlate explores whether food and nutrition education can be built in a way that fits the realities of peer work and the lives of peer workers.
What the PeerPlate Program will do
The PeerPlate Program will support participating peer workers to increase their own food and nutrition knowledge, confidence, and practical food skills.
The goal is to strengthen food and nutrition literacy in a way that supports peer workers’ own food practices, using a program designed with peers, for peers.
Food and nutrition literacy is more than knowing what foods are “healthy”. It includes the knowledge, confidence, and practical skills to plan, choose, prepare, and use food in ways that support health, wellbeing, and daily life.
For peer workers themselves, this may include:
building confidence with everyday food decisions
understanding food and nutrition in practical, non-judgemental ways
developing realistic strategies for shopping, planning, preparing, and eating
recognising how mental health, medication, fatigue, income, housing, food access, and work demands can affect food practices
finding ways to support their own wellbeing through food and nutrition in ways that are realistic, flexible, and sustainable
The program is not about perfect eating, weight loss, blame, or telling people what they should eat. It is about practical food and nutrition literacy that fits real life.
How this connects to peer work practice
PeerPlate starts with peer workers’ own food and nutrition literacy because that is how the peer work model works.
Peer work is not based on an expert telling someone else what to do. It is based on lived experience practice, mutuality, relational support, recovery-oriented practice, and professional boundaries.
Because of this, the project will also explore how peer workers’ own learning and experience may relate to the real situations where food, nutrition, wellbeing, and daily living come up in peer work.
This does not mean peer workers are being trained to give nutrition advice. It means the project will explore what safe, practical, and appropriate food-related conversations could look like within peer work boundaries.
For example, this may include understanding when to listen, when to share from lived experience, when to support practical problem-solving, and when to suggest referral to a dietitian, GP, or other health professional.
What the program is not
The PeerPlate Program is not designed to train peer workers to provide clinical nutrition advice.
It is not designed to train peer workers to run nutrition education programs for clients.
It is not a train-the-trainer model.
Peer workers will not be positioned as dietitians, nutritionists, or clinical health educators. The program is about strengthening food and nutrition literacy within the peer workforce first.
Any future content about food-related conversations in peer work will be developed through the research process and will stay within the professional scope of peer work, including lived experience practice, mutuality, relational support, recovery-oriented practice, and clear role boundaries.
Why this is different from many health education programs
-
Why this is different from many health education programs
Many public health and nutrition programs follow a familiar path:
Experts create a program.
They consult with stakeholders or community members.
They run the program.
If it works, they train members of the community or workforce to deliver it.
That model can be useful in some settings, but it does not fully fit the purpose of PeerPlate.
PeerPlate is not starting with an expert-led nutrition program that will later be handed to peer workers. Instead, it starts with the peer workforce itself: their role, their practice, their skills, their experiences, their barriers, and their knowledge of what is realistic in mental health peer work.
This project is exploring whether nutrition education can be developed in a way that fits the peer work model from the beginning.
-
Like recovery, changing food practices is usually not a simple one-off event. It is ongoing. People learn, try things, adjust, have setbacks, build routines, lose routines, and start again.
That ongoing process does not always fit neatly with traditional health education. Being handed information is rarely enough. People often need practical strategies, support, confidence, and time to work out what fits their life.
This is where the peer workforce may bring something different.
Peer work already operates in spaces where change is personal, relational, practical, and non-linear. Peer workers understand that people are not problems to be fixed. They understand that support needs to be realistic, respectful, and grounded in the person’s own life.
PeerPlate is exploring how food and nutrition education can be developed in a way that respects that approach.
-
There will be several ways for peer workers to be involved in the PeerPlate Project.
Focus groups
The first stage involving peer workers will be focus groups.
Focus groups will explore what matters in the real world of food, nutrition, wellbeing, and peer work. They will help identify the barriers, priorities, concerns, and opportunities that need to be understood before a program is designed.
The focus groups are not training sessions. They are research discussions. Their purpose is to help shape the next stage of the project by identifying what the PeerPlate Program needs to understand.
PeerPlate Design Workshops
The next stage will involve PeerPlate Design Workshops.
These workshops will bring peer workers and researchers together to co-design the PeerPlate Program. This means the program will not be designed by researchers alone and then handed to peer workers at the end.
The workshops will help decide what the program should include, how it should be delivered, what language should be used, what needs to be avoided, and how the program can fit the realities of peer work.
Program participation
Once the PeerPlate Program has been developed, WA peer workers will be invited to take part in the program as participants.
This stage will help test whether the program is useful, realistic, acceptable, and safe for the peer workforce. It will also help identify what needs to be changed before the program is used more widely or tested in future research.
Contributing to the research
Peer workers may also contribute to the research through interviews, focus groups, workshop participation, and surveys over the course of the study.
This may include qualitative data, such as discussion, reflection, and interviews, as well as quantitative data, such as surveys about food and nutrition literacy, wellbeing, and related outcomes.
This information will help the research team understand what changed, what worked, what did not work, and what needs to be improved.
What co-design means in PeerPlate
Co-design means designing something with the people it is for, not simply designing it for them.
Co-design may sound like a specific term, but the idea behind it is not new. In Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, the term co-design is commonly used in health, mental health, disability, social services, and community program development. Similar participatory approaches are used internationally under names such as community-based participatory research, participatory action research, co-production, and community-led research, depending on the country, discipline, and setting.
These approaches have a long history in public health, community development, social justice, and Indigenous health research, including work with Indigenous communities in Canada and internationally. The shared idea is that people with direct experience should help shape the programs, services, and research intended for them.
In research and program development, the word “co-design” is sometimes used in many different ways. It can be confused with consultation or collaboration.
Consultation usually means people are asked for feedback on something that has already been mostly decided.
Collaboration usually means people contribute to parts of a project, but the main design and decisions may still sit mostly with the researchers or organisation.
Co-design goes further. It means people with direct experience have a real role in shaping the design.
In PeerPlate, this means peer workers will help shape the program content, delivery, language, priorities, and boundaries.
At the same time, co-design does not mean every part of a project is open-ended or decided by everyone. A good co-design project should be clear about what is being co-designed and what is not.
PeerPlate is also a PhD project. This means it must meet academic, ethical, methodological, and supervision requirements. Some parts of the research design are shaped by doctoral research requirements. Other parts will be shaped through focus groups, advisory input, and co-design workshops.
Throughout the project, and in any published results or program materials, PeerPlate will clearly state what was co-designed, who was involved, how decisions were made, and what parts of the project were not open to co-design.
-
PeerPlate is a co-designed project, but it is not completely open-ended. Some parts are set by the requirements of doctoral research, ethics approval, research governance, academic supervision, and the approved PhD research proposal.
There are also broad commitments attached to the project’s funding and university approval. These include improving health and wellbeing in Western Australia, supporting healthy eating and mental wellbeing, and contributing to collaborative, evidence-informed research that can strengthen community health.
This means the co-design process will not decide whether the project is about food, nutrition, mental health, and the professional peer workforce. Those broad aims are already part of the approved research project.
The co-design process will focus on the parts where peer worker experience is essential: what the program should include, how it should be delivered, what language should be used, what practical activities are useful, what boundaries need to be clear, and how the program can fit the real world of peer work.
Throughout the project, PeerPlate will clearly report what was co-designed, what was shaped by research or funding requirements, who was involved, and how decisions were made.
Join a PeerPlate Focus Group
When you follow the link, you will be taken to Curtin University Qualtrics. Study information, registration, and contact details are managed there, not on this website.
Language used in this project
Language in mental health, lived experience, and community services is not always consistent. Different organisations may use different terms, including client, consumer, participant, service user, person accessing support, or person being supported.
This project mainly uses the terms peer worker and peer workforce because the focus is the professional mental health peer workforce.
When referring to the people peer workers support, this project generally uses people they support. This keeps the language broad enough to fit different service contexts while avoiding assumptions about the preferred language of any one organisation.
The topic of language used across the project and in reference to people, groups, and professions will be addressed in the Focus Groups and Co-Design Workshops. Changes to this website and other project materials will be made accordingly.
Direction of PeerPlate
Who is involved
PeerPlate will involve peer workers, researchers, community partners, research partners, a university, and funding bodies.
Specific partner organisations, university details, and funding acknowledgements will be added once permissions have been confirmed.
Recruitment will occur through WA-based community mental health services, non-government organisations, peer workforce networks, and relevant community partners. The aim is to involve professional mental health peer workers who understand the realities of peer work in Western Australia.
Where the project is heading
PeerPlate is being developed as both a community program and a research project.
On the community side, the longer-term goal is to make the completed PeerPlate Program available to the mental health peer workforce across Western Australia and, eventually, beyond WA. The aim is to create a practical, peer-informed nutrition literacy program that can support peer workforce wellbeing and professional development.
On the research side, the PhD will develop and pilot the PeerPlate Program. A pilot study does not prove that a program works at scale. Instead, it helps test whether the program is useful, acceptable, realistic, safe, and ready for further testing.
If the pilot findings support the next stage of research, the longer-term research goal is to seek funding for a larger controlled trial. This would allow the program to be tested more rigorously and refined for wider use.
PeerPlate is not asking peer workers to become nutrition experts. It is asking whether food and nutrition education can be built in a way that respects what peer workers already bring: lived experience, relational support, mutuality, practical wisdom, and an understanding that change is rarely simple, linear, or finished.
