PEER SUPPORT
FROM THE GROUND UP
W hat would drug and alcohol support look like if we designed it around people’ s lives today? Would we build the same boundaries between treatment, housing, healthcare and community support? Would we use the same measures of success? Would the people most affected have to wait for an invitation to influence the decisions?
These are the questions Beautiful Monsters wants to bring into the open. They ask us to examine arrangements that can become so familiar that we stop questioning them. A service can meet its contractual requirements while someone struggles to get the support they desperately need. Improving one part of that system may leave the gaps between its parts untouched.
Beautiful Monsters is a CIC and a peer-led system change
The new Beautiful Monsters manifesto maps a journey from lived and living experience to lasting system change. What would we build if we started again, ask Mark Tudor and George Charlton
movement helping people build beautiful futures. Our ambition is to change how problems are understood, how responses are developed and who has the power to shape them. Our manifesto sets out the journey from understanding what is happening to building something totally wonderful which communities can sustain. The manifesto launched on 30 October, opening a meaningful conversation about what needs to change and setting out a practical route for doing the work together.
THE RIGHT QUESTIONS A missed appointment can become a judgement about motivation. A referral can be counted as progress before anyone knows whether support was received. Someone can be described as difficult to engage without asking how difficult the service is to access, and a positive urine sample can see you kicked off your script. Our starting point is that people are not the problem – systems can be.
That doesn’ t remove personal agency or dismiss the commitment of practitioners. It widens the questions we ask. What happened to this person? Which rules, relationships or barriers influenced the outcome? What could change in the way support is organised? Those questions take us beyond asking people to adapt to arrangements to informing us that the whole process itself may need redesigning.
We also want to challenge the assumption that involvement automatically means influence. If people accessing services can describe their experiences but cannot change priorities, decisions or delivery, then the balance of power remains much the same. Peer-led must mean meaningful responsibility and ownership, with the support and resources to exercise them.
Changing a system means examining the decisions that keep producing the same barriers: who sets the priorities, what gets funded, how organisations share responsibility and whose definition of success counts. A Beautiful Monsters local project can reveal where those arrangements need to change. We want its learning to travel into governance, commissioning and everyday practice, so that improvements become part of how support works rather than depending on a few individuals continually bridging the gaps.
ADDRESSING THE GAP For Beautiful Monsters, innovation begins with understanding what people need, and being willing to question the usual response. It may involve a different partnership, a peer-led way of navigating support, a redesigned transition from prison or a community space
16 • DRINK AND DRUGS NEWS • NOVEMBER 2026 WWW. DRINKANDDRUGSNEWS. COM