This third paper in Imroc’s Recovery Colleges: Sharing Our Experience series explores how Lincolnshire Recovery College has worked to include unpaid family carers in its offer. Building on previous papers that highlighted the development of Recovery Colleges in clinical settings and the importance of cultural inclusivity, this contribution shares practical insights into designing and delivering courses for family carers—highlighting both the challenges encountered and the benefits of greater inclusion.

This paper presents a trauma-informed, recovery-focused approach to improving acute inpatient care at Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust, in partnership with Imroc. The initiative empowers staff to work alongside the people they serve, driving meaningful change.

At Imroc, we believe real transformation happens when values-based approaches are embedded within systems. Guided by the Imroc Acute Care briefing paper, this work provides a structured framework for innovation. Through our Sharing Experiences papers, we showcase practical examples of how recovery-oriented approaches can be implemented within large systems, inspiring change beyond individual organisations.

Inspired by Imroc’s transformative event, Peer Support: Visions of Opportunity for 2030, this report explores the future of peer support through the lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. With insights from 180 passionate participants, it delves into strategies for expanding peer support, the potential for an oversight body, and how organisations can meaningfully support Peer Support Workers (PSWs). Through diverse voices, this reflection captures the complex journey toward a more inclusive and effective peer support movement.

This is the second paper in the ‘Sharing our Experience’ series that is designed to explore different facets of Recovery Colleges and how the principles on which they are based (see Perkins et al, 2018) are realised in different contexts. In the first paper in this ‘Sharing Our Experience’ series, colleagues from the Recovery College within the Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences in Canada provided insights into the creative and thoughtful ways in which the core principles of a Recovery College were realised in practice in a largely clinical mental health service as a core part of a broader ‘Recovery Action Plan’.

Since the idea of ‘Recovery Colleges’ was first introduced in 2006/7, they have been taken up widely both across the UK and in many other parts of the world. Increasingly Recovery Colleges form a core part of recovery focused mental health services: they both embody the recovery-focused transformation of services and drive broader organisational change across services.