Hi – I’m Jessica!
I enjoy anything that explores the great mystery of being alive on this planet. I love the natural world, living life with my cat, slow mornings with rising rituals, cooking, creating, dancing, and music. I joined Pathways Vermont in October 2024 as the Team Lead at Rosewood Cottage.
Pathways Vermont’s Peer Respite – Rosewood Cottage just opened this past December. The team and I literally started on day one, building furniture together piece by piece. Once we set up the house and put together our intake process, which we call pre-registration, our first guests arrived! Each day is different. I could be sipping tea with a guest, planning an outing to a local cafe or what we’re going to cook for dinner, or sitting in silence with someone moving through deep distress. My role as Team Lead is multifaceted. I support the daily operations of the house and coordinate and supervise our team. I answer the Rosewood phone line and meet with potential guests. I take part in larger conversations on peer respite creation and sustainability. I’d say the central and best part of my role is being with our guests, providing peer support.
If we look at our history there have always been people designated as specialists based on their talents and lived experiences. At the core of our work is connection. My job is to connect as a fellow human being traversing life, not as an expert or someone who knows you better than you know yourself. This is key because we’re taking ourselves out of the helper role that often disempowers and disconnects people from trusting themselves. As peer supporters, we’re on the journey of learning together, sharing what works for us right now, and demonstrating the magic of being seen and heard as we are. Expressions of the human range of experience are too often labeled as a deficit–as something wrong with us–for profit and power over. In the West, we don’t yet have the spiritual or cultural language to talk about the deeper meaning of these experiences. Peer respites see something that gets called a ‘mental health crisis’ as a transformational time in one’s life and provide the space and support to move through it and allow exploration and meaning-making to take place.
Pathways’ mission aligns with my mission. My passion for this work comes from living through extreme experiences, psychiatric incarceration, and subsequent entanglement with services in the public sector. These encounters led me to work as a peer specialist in designated agencies, to co-founding committees developing alternatives, to coordinating a pilot project that grew into Interlude, CSAC’s Mental Health Urgent Care. Arrival to this chapter of life required shifting my story from victim of circumstance to creator of circumstance and holding the perspective that our greatest challenge can be our greatest gift and service to the world. My niche is creating beautiful spaces that invite our full-dimensional humanness and explore the stories that shape our realities.
My favorite memory of working at Pathways Vermont so far was when we were all gathered around the fire pit in our front yard, sipping spicy hot chocolate, sitting on earth talking about life.
What motivates me to come to work every day is knowing that we are creating a living example of what is possible in mental health care and that we are not alone in this mission. We are standing on the shoulders of a movement–a human rights movement–that has made it all possible. From working within DAs, I was up close with a system that was providing a lot of jobs to people as “helpers” but not really helping anyone. In these settings and roles, people couldn’t just be human beings together in the messiness of life. I don’t think the reform of a mental health system built on crumbling colonization is even possible. We just need more peer respite homes full of beauty, love, and support–one in every county. My vision for the future is that peer respites become the mainstream rather than the alternative and that we move from treatment to support as we evolve our understanding of mental health.
