Caroline Mazel Carlton (she/her)

Caroline Mazel-Carlton has laid her head in a number of places, from Indiana jail cells to Texas psychiatric units, but now enjoys a freer existence as Director of Training for the Wildflower Alliance and the Hearing Voices Research and Development Project. Since moving out of a staffed psychiatric residential facility in 2009, Caroline has worked tirelessly to create change in the mental health system and has developed and re-defined peer roles in a number of settings across the globe from North Carolina to Western Australia.

Caroline’s passion is centering and exploring the experiences that are often the most silenced, such as suicide, trauma and non-consensus reality states. Her work with “Alternatives to Suicide” and the Hearing Voices Network has been featured in popular media outlets such as the New York Times, Foreign Policy and O magazine. Caroline has contributed to multiple academic publications on the topic of suicide and one book on her experience skating on a roller derby team as #18 “Mazel Tov Cocktail”. Caroline is also passionate about re-claiming cultural and spiritual wisdom traditions for navigating extreme states and is now preparing to become a rabbi as a Kesher fellow in the ALEPH Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

Sean Donovan (he/him)

Sean is a trainer for Alternatives to Suicide, When Conversation Turns to Suicide, and Intentional Peer Support trainings, and has presented at national conferences about these things and more. He brings his experiences as a queer man surviving suicidal thoughts and psychiatric hospitalization to his work as an advocate in these settings. Sean facilitates weekly Alternatives to Suicide and LGBTQIA+ support groups. He also coordinates Career Initiatives — small business and creative project — grants for folks with great ideas but fewer resources, and helps develop written and film advocacy resources.

Sean is passionate about preserving queer history and making it more accessible. He serves on the board of the Sexual Minorities Archives, where he also started a podcast, Out of the Archives. While due to despair or fatigue he doesn’t leave bed everyday, he does also find time to make music with folks which he’s loved doing for most his life — these days he plays in a band with two powerful women called Feminine Aggression.

Rafael Rodriguez (he/him)

Rafael comes from a place of having learned through living. He himself has been homeless, struggled with problems with substances, and suicidal thoughts, among other life experiences that he has not only survived but learned from. Rafael is also a father, a chef, and loves football. He is also bilingual (English/Spanish) and available to offer supports in both languages.

Natan Cohen (they/them)

Natan is a non-binary, Ashkenazi Jewish, and autistic member of the Wildflower Alliance senior leadership and training team. Their title is Assistant Director of the Wildflower Alliance, directing online support spaces on Discord and Zoom. Natan grew up and currently lives in our home area of Western Massachusetts. Natan is someone who has experienced childhood trauma, bullying, addiction, emotional and spiritual abuse, homelessness, chronic illness, suicide attempts, and many extreme and unusual states. They have sought answers to their problems all over – from western medicine to the far reaches of alternative healing spiritual groups, and cults. They eventually found well-being and belonging in peer support communities. Natan is a lover of compassionate truth-telling, comedy, science, and sharing the potential of peer support. They currently spend a lot of time on Wildflower Alliance’s Discord Server and helping to coordinate other Online Supports.

As a former drug dealer, Natan’s work has included a focus on holding space for people who use drugs, and people who are currently and formerly incarcerated.  

Outside of Wildflower Alliance Natan dabbles in local journalism, media criticism, creating video essays, and writing fiction. They are passionate about cats, roleplaying, parenting two disabled children, video games, fantasy and science-fiction, and spending time near moving water.

Sasha Dunbar (all pronouns)

sasha dunbar (all pronouns) is in awe of the ever-unfolding wisdom of their Wildflower Alliance community, whether it’s in training, group facilitation or one-on-one support. They are newly rooting in Durham, NC after years of wearing snow pants most months in New England. 

Being a Black and mixed (Jamaican+Scottish) first-gen U.S. American from NYC informs how they show up in the world, as do being genderless and dysfunctionally empathic and from a low-income background. 

After years of farming and working with kids, being forcibly hospitalized during a time of crisis and breakthrough in 2018 led them towards anti-carceral peer support. They took their first Wildflower training in 2020 and joined the Amherst team in 2022 as a Community Bridger, spearheading the walking in nature support group as well as holding space in hospitals, libraries, and church basements. This work teaches them humility, open-mindedness, boundaries, and life beyond the fixer-role. 

Conversations at the forefront often include: race, imperialism, movement-building, ancestors, death, spirituality and the body. They refuse to accept that people should be punished for being vulnerable. The beauty, brutality, and bizarreness of the world takes their breath away, which sometimes looks like crying with laughter. Thank goodness for community. 

They can’t sit still despite working remotely, and are usually eating popcorn and sitting on foam rollers while typing. Offline, they are learning Spanish, making messy craft projects, hanging out at the library with their bonus kids or basking in the more-than-humxn world. 

Liz Mombourquette

Liz Mombourquette is a queer trauma survivor who grew up in Central Massachusetts and has navigated self-injury and thoughts of suicide from an early age. She brings these and other challenging life experiences to her work facilitating mutual support groups in hospital settings and in the community, bridging people from psychiatric hospitals, advocating for people’s rights in restrictive settings, and pushing for system change. In addition to her work as a bridger, Liz is involved in statewide advocacy for the integrity of peer roles within the state of Massachusetts. She has offered open testimony against discriminatory legislation, facilitated statewide meetings, and worked on subcommittees dedicated to defending peer roles from co-optation. Liz is a Certified Peer Specialist, a trainer in the Wildflower Alliance’s Alternatives to Suicide, When Conversation Turns to Suicide, Self-Injury, and Hearing Voices curricula and an Intentional Peer Support Trainer. 

During her spare time, Liz enjoys spending time with her child, hiking, playing video games, reading graphic novels, watching Star Trek, and being near trees.

Tasha (they/them)

Tásha is a Community Bridger, group facilitator, trainer, and works to support people navigating the psychiatric system. They are queer, multiple, neurodivergent, a voice hearer, an artist, and a survivor of trauma and the psychiatric system. 

Tásha settled in Western Massachusetts more than a decade ago after living most of their life in Georgia. They first joined the Wildflower Alliance as a community member in 2015 after struggling with self-harm, suicide, trauma, and seeking to understand their voices, their visions, and their neurodiversity for most of their life. In 2017, they started working per-diem hours in the centers and joined the community bridging team, doing work to support people in short and long-term psychiatric facilities and those transitioning back to the community. They regularly facilitate various support groups including Alternatives to Suicide and Hearing Voices Network groups and in 2019 became a Hearing Voices Facilitator Trainer. In 2023, they founded the “Moving Beyond Psychiatric Hospitalization Open Chat” on the Wildflower Alliance’s Discord server. Tásha developed and facilitates the “Know Your Rights” training centered around people becoming informed of their rights while they navigate an involuntary psychiatric hold (“section”) in the state of Massachusetts.

Tásha has a strong connection with cats, and recently adopted two kittens. They create art that captures their personal experiences of voices, visions, and understanding themself as more than one. They enjoy reading fantasy, sci-fi fiction, and graphic novels; planning and dreaming of the graphic novel they want to create; and playing console and MMO video games in their free time. 

Calvin Moen (he/him)

Calvin has been developing curriculum and facilitating trainings in Vermont, Massachusetts, and nationally for the past decade, including Intentional Peer Support and A Harm Reduction Approach to Psych Drugs, and presenting and writing on topics like alternatives to policing, and intersections of queer and mad struggles. For him, being an educator is about co-creating learning spaces and sharing resources, not replicating the dominance of authority he encountered in churches and doctors’ offices.

Calvin survived an upbringing characterized by violence, neglect, poverty, religious repression, sexual abuse, and bullying, only to be told by psychiatrists that his emotional suffering was caused by a chemically imbalanced brain. Medication and hospitalization only deepened his sense of isolation and brokenness. By forming connections with people who had discovered value and meaning in the ways we adapt to our surroundings, Calvin came to understand his pain in the context of social structures and oppressive systems. He learned that he was not alone and that his feelings were not a medical problem, and was able to shed some of the shame he had internalized about being queer and trans. These days he still deeply feels the heaviness of living in an unjust world and does a lot of crying yet cultivates liberation and gives voice to his mouthy inner demons by writing apocalyptic fiction, singing in his band This Could Be It, and performing burlesque as Johnny Cashmere.

Jennifer Tirado

Jennifer is a Peer Facilitator and Trainer. She is also the Project Coordinator for the Alternatives to Suicide Network in Connecticut. 

Jennifer identifies as Latina and Neurodivergent. Jennifer had years of feeling a lack of purpose and disconnection. She sought help from the traditional psychiatric model but found it too often led to a dead end. After several stints at the hospital and a list of diagnoses, Jennifer found herself down a winding path of self-discovery. She began her pursuit of finding purpose in her work through taking on a job in Human Services. She found meaning in the opportunity to steady her mind by focusing on someone else. She got involved in Co-counseling.  She discovered the Mad Pride movement and began to see her experiences from other perspectives. She was trained as a certified Recovery Support Specialist at Advocacy Unlimited, in 2016. She is trained in Intentional Peer Support. Jennifer was inspired by the values of Peer Support work and how it related to the idea of the “Wounded Healer” archetype. Jennifer became  involved in advocacy and has experience providing testimony at the state Capitol. She has trained other facilitators in Hearing Voices Network and Alternatives to Suicide approaches. She has also facilitated groups with techniques inspired from Yoga, Music and Writing. 

Jennifer is a writer who uses the experience of mental distress and neurodivergence in her work. 

Her work has appeared in Divergents Magazine.

Jennifer loves New England road trips, playing her ukulele, and spending time with her cats.

Micah Matthias (he/him)

Micah is a white queer and transgender trauma survivor who grew up as a fundamentalist Christian in the southeastern US. He’s had experience working in peer support, working with young people in and outside of the traditional mental health system, and doing LGBTQ+ community organizing. Micah spends most of his time trying to figure out how to be a good parent to a young child, wondering about the possibilities of true community in the context of a changing world, facilitating virtual support spaces while sitting next to his 2 cats, and appreciating the beauty and abundance of rural New England.

Tokyo Baldwin (she/her)

Tokyo is a straight, black woman with experience navigating thoughts of suicide, in addition to overcoming racial trauma. Tokyo excels at paving paths where none existed previously and overcoming adversity. She works at Afiya; the first and only peer respite in Western Mass. With an Associates Degree in Criminal Justice, Tokyo strives to make a positive productive difference in the world; for her daughter and her community.

Sam Captain (she/her)

Sam Captain has faced mental health challenges from a very young age.  She grew up in a home where physical and emotional abuse took place regularly, as did neglect.  She lived through trauma after trauma for the better part of 35 years, all the while seeing suicide as her escape hatch and a way to restore some of the overwhelming loss of power and control she experienced.  She has lived through suicide attempts and the subsequent hospitalizations that resulted.  While hospitalized Sam found her community in the other patients, there she met other people who had experienced similar challenges.  These connections to a community of people who understood her would eventually lead her to a more fulfilling life.

Throughout her thirties, Sam also experienced a significant amount of loss, and the grief that has followed each loss has only compounded.  However, she found that grief was an important teacher for her, at each loss she experienced a re-evaluation of her life and priorities, eventually leading her to the path of peer support.  Sam started this journey in the clinical mental health world but now finds herself running a residential program in a peer support agency in Manchester, NH as well as training for Wildflower Alliance.  Training has become a passion of Sam’s, it is a way for her to give the pain she has been through purpose, and it allows her to have an impact on her community.  She trains in the areas of Alternatives to Suicide, When the Conversation Turns to Suicide, Hearing Voices, Intentional Peer Support, and is a Certified Peer Specialist in New Hampshire.

Sam has also been working as a professional photographer for the last 12 years. Doing a documentary on the Anti-Iraq war protest movement is something she is particularly proud of, it started her interest in using her art to call attention to social movements and tell the story of social change. Though most of her professional photography experience is in weddings, she also does portraits and is an enthusiastic landscape artist. She pairs her landscape photography with her love of traveling and she is an avid sunrise chaser.  This love of capturing the natural world has been incredibly healing and grounding.

Jude Grophear (she/her)

Jude Grophear is a creative soul who loves animals, nature, music, video games, writing, films & tv shows, reading, family and friends, and so, so many other things that have kept her invested in living. 

 As someone who learned from a young age that you don’t talk about certain experiences if you value your independence, she found a space of freedom in the nonclinical peer support world where conversations and education around mad liberation and intersectionality with other social justice movements are often held. 

She has now worked in peer support for over a decade, and has presented at local, national, and international conferences. In 2020, she gave a TEDxTalk with a colleague about co-creating an Intentional Peer Support (IPS) based youth peer support pilot program. 

Some of the things that inform her work as a trainer include experiences of voice hearing and multiplicity/plurality, psychiatric oppression, living through significant traumas, and surviving a suicide attempt. She is an Advanced Level WRAP (Wellness Recovery Action Plan) Co-Facilitator, an IPS statewide Trainer/Facilitator, a Hearing Voices Network-USA Facilitator, and is now a part of the Wildflower Alliance training team. One of the things she is most proud of is co-creating the first Hearing Voices Network group in NH in 2015, as well as being part of creating the first peer-run Survivors of Suicide Attempts support group in NH.

Martha Barbone (she/her)

Martha spent 15 years in mental health treatment including many hospitalizations, medications and other therapeutic interventions, before discovering peer support. This led to newfound hope and discovery of inner strength. She has worked providing peer support and training in clinical and peer-run organizations and uses her voice to advocate for systems change. Martha is a member of the Alternatives to Suicide training team.

Peter Bullimore (he/him)

Peter is a voice hearer who spent ten years as a psychiatric patient enduring many bouts of what gets called “paranoia” and unusual beliefs. Through learning holistic approaches and with support of the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) he was able to reclaim his life from the system. He facilitates a hearing voices and paranoia support group in Sheffield. He also runs his own training and consultancy agency, Asylum Associates, and is the founding member of the Paranoia Network. His story was featured in the film, ‘There is a Fault in Reality,’ by Tom Cotton, as well as in one of the foundational HVN texts, Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery. He delivers training on hearing voices and unusual beliefs internationally. He also teaches on the COPE initiative and the Maastricht Interview at Manchester University, as well as offering the Maastricht at Dublin and Cork Universities in Ireland. He co-authored a workbook on childhood trauma called ‘Asking the Questions’ with Paul Hammersley and John Read.

See Peter’s Full Training Menu Here