Wednesday and Thursday Keynote Speakers

 Kim Colegrove: You Deserve to Live, Work, and Retire Healthfully: Understanding the responder’s unique path to wellbeing.

• Author and international speaker, Kim Colegrove, wants you to be well. In this presentation, she’ll present a path to wellbeing that’s been tested and approved by your peers. Learn how small steps reap big gains and discover simple, foundational practices to support you on your journey.

 Tim Dietz: NW Director of WCPR and Author of Scenes of Compassion: Dealing with Emergency Scene Emotional Crisis.

• Even a brief encounter on scene can have a tremendous impact on anyone going through significant emotional or traumatic events. Drawing from 30+ years’ experience as a first responder, Tim offers simple tools for how to demonstrate on-scene compassion for victims and survivors while maintaining one’s own emotional health and avoiding compassion fatigue. 

Panel Discussion: Adversity to Advocate: Humanizing the other side of the badge and equipping peer supporters with strategies to better assist colleagues struggling with adversity.

• A panel discussion with First Responders, Behavioral Health Specialists, and Advocates. Each with a personal experience of how adversity led to substance abuse as a primary coping mechanism, until one choice at a time, it led to the inevitable consequences that then became the catalyst to turn substance abuse in adversity into advocacy for others. 

Josh Goldberg: CEO of Struggle Well: Post Traumatic Growth Training

• Post Traumatic Growth is a positive psychological transformation that can happen after trauma. The science of PTG demonstrates that when we’re forced to reflect on our lives and make sense of the destruction caused by trauma, our struggles can become a catalyst for change. Trauma does not have to be the end of the road, rather it can be the path to a new beginning. When those who serve on the frontlines are able to learn the strategies to transform struggle into strength, they are then able to be of the best service to themselves, their family, and community long term. 

 Wednesday and Thursday Breakout Sessions:

• Strategies for emotional wellbeing in retirement
• Building a wellness culture
• Compassionate Leadership
• Refreshing the practical skills and procedures critical to a CISD
• Dispatch – Peer Support in the PSAP
• Chaplains – Financial planning
• Peer Team Coordinators – Practical steps for Peer Team Coordinators
• Yoga for first responders

 Tuesday’s Preconference will focus on Peer Support Team development with sessions for all attendees as well as afternoon time for teams to choose breakouts sessions or individual agency/department training on their own.