Peer support & lived-experience work
The one field where your record is the qualification.
This month: volunteer peer mentor
Recovery services, prison-leaver charities and housing projects all run trained volunteer schemes — expenses paid, training free.
Training providedMonth 3–6: first paid role
Peer mentor and recovery worker posts at £24–27k. Lived experience is listed as essential — you're ahead of every applicant without it.
Your record helps hereEnhanced DBS — the honest bit
These roles check everything, and hire anyway: services assess your record openly rather than filtering you out. Time since offence matters.
Enhanced check — talked through, not hiddenThe ceiling: the sector is yours
Service coordinator, trainer, lived-experience consultant at £200+/day. People who walked this path now run organisations on it.
Not sure where your record stands? Since October 2023 most records become spent far sooner than people assume — and spent records are invisible to a Basic check.
Check yours — it stays on your phone →Real places to start
Links open the real provider. Good:Folk never sits in the middle.
Employers that actively hire on this route
Public programmes for hiring people with convictions — doors that actually open.
More like this
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