PAVE Pathways: Continuing Education Kits, Built by People Who Lived It
The PAVE Pathways catalog spans 225 continuing education topics across nine practice domains. Each kit is a self-contained training package with a facilitator guide, participant workbook, slide deck, and post-test, written for peer specialists and the behavioral health and public health teams that supervise them. Kits are designed to be delivered as-is or adapted to an organization's existing training calendar and documentation requirements.
Available now
LifeSync and Purpose
What Is LifeSync?
Finding the Place Where Who You Are Meets How You Live
This complete, facilitator-ready training kit introduces PAVE's purpose-alignment framework, showing how to find harmony between who a person is, what they love, and how they live day to day. It adapts the Ikigai model for peer-led growth rather than corporate goal setting, and frames purpose as an ongoing practice of alignment across personal values, professional skills, and community impact. Grounded in positive psychology, purpose-in-life research, and longevity studies. Written in plain, warm language for adult learners, including people in recovery and people returning from incarceration who are now doing this work.
Understanding Survival, Building Trauma-Informed Support
Most people who struggle with substances are carrying pain that started long before the first use. This complete, facilitator-ready training kit helps frontline staff, peer leaders, and justice-impacted program teams understand how trauma and chronic stress sensitize the brain's threat-detection systems, why substance use so often works as an adaptive way to regulate overwhelming emotional pain, and how to build support around the three core trauma-informed principles of safety, choice, and empowerment. Grounded in SAMHSA, NIDA, the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study, and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. Written in plain, warm language for adult learners, including people in active recovery and people returning from incarceration.
Shame is one of the strongest forces keeping people stuck in substance use cycles, and it is one of the least directly addressed in most programs. This complete, facilitator-ready training kit helps peer specialists, counselors, and reentry staff teach the difference between "I did something bad" and "I am bad," show how shame drives secrecy, isolation, and return to use, and practice cognitive tools and self-forgiveness steps that disarm self-stigma. Grounded in SAMHSA, NIDA, CCAR, and the research base on shame, guilt, and stigma in recovery. Written in plain, warm language for adult learners, including people in active recovery and people returning from incarceration.
The people doing the supporting carry a load nobody talks about. This complete, facilitator-ready training kit helps peer specialists, recovery coaches, caregivers, and frontline staff recognize the early warning signs of compassion fatigue, tell the difference between healthy empathy and absorbing other people's pain, and build steady practices for peer debriefing, reflection, and firm emotional boundaries. Grounded in SAMHSA, NIDA, CCAR, and the research base on secondary traumatic stress and burnout. Written in plain, warm language for adult learners, including people in recovery and people returning from incarceration who are now doing this work.
Building Trust First: Community Engagement for Programs People Actually Show Up To
Why Trust Comes Before Outreach, and How to Earn It
This complete, facilitator-ready training kit teaches outreach and engagement staff how to build the kind of trust that turns a flyer into a full room, especially with communities that have been let down by outside organizations before. It treats trust as something earned through consistency and follow-through, not something assumed because an organization means well, and it gives practical, low-cost ways to meet people where they are. Built on community engagement and community-based participatory research guidance, and written in plain, warm language for adult learners, including peer specialists, outreach workers, and people in recovery or returning from incarceration who are now doing this work.
Finding and Winning Small Grants: Resource Development for Grassroots Programs
A Peer-Led Approach to Funding Real Community Work
This complete, facilitator-ready training kit gives peer-led organizations without a dedicated development team a clear, step-by-step process for finding, applying for, and managing small grants that fund real community work. It treats grant writing as a learnable skill rather than a mystery reserved for people with advanced degrees, and it is honest about the paperwork and follow-through required after the money arrives. Built on established funder guidance and nonprofit capacity-building research, and written in plain, warm language for adult learners, including peer specialists, grassroots organizers, and people in recovery or returning from incarceration who are now running or supporting programs.
From Peer to Leader: Growing Into Leadership Without Losing Your Roots
Mentorship Skills for Peer Specialists Stepping Into Their First Leadership Role
This complete, facilitator-ready training kit supports peer specialists and frontline staff who are stepping into supervisory or mentorship roles for the first time, often without any formal management training. It treats the shift from being a peer among peers to holding a leadership role as an identity change that deserves real preparation, not just a new title, and it is honest that carrying responsibility for others can put a leader's own recovery and wellbeing at risk if they do not protect it. Built on established peer supervision, mentorship, and workforce development guidance, and written in warm, plain language for adult learners, including people in recovery or returning from incarceration who are now stepping into these roles.
Measuring What Matters: Simple Evaluation for Programs That Don't Have a Data Team
Tracking Outcomes and Telling Your Program's Real Story Without a Statistics Degree
This complete, facilitator-ready training kit gives frontline staff and program leads a plain-language way to track outcomes and tell their program's real story, without needing a statistics background or expensive software. It draws a clear line between counting activity and measuring impact, and it treats data collection as a habit the team can actually sustain, not a burden bolted on to satisfy a funder. Built on established nonprofit evaluation and outcomes measurement guidance, and written in warm, plain language for adult learners, including peer specialists, program coordinators, and people in recovery or returning from incarceration who are now running or supporting programs.
Honoring Survivors, Building Whole-Person Wellness
More than half of people living with diagnosed HIV in the United States are now age 50 or older. This complete, facilitator-ready training kit helps frontline staff and peer leaders recognize the medical, cognitive, and emotional realities of aging with HIV, including AIDS Survivor Syndrome, and apply PAVE's R.A.C.E. framework and the MIPA principle to build programs that honor long-term survivors as experts, not afterthoughts. Grounded in HIV.gov, NIH HIVinfo, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
One representative topic from each of the nine practice domains, in development now. These previews show the shape of the kits being built next.
AddictionComing Soon
Understanding Cravings
A practical look at how cravings function in the brain and body, and how to navigate them without automatic reaction.
ADD-1.2 · In development
HIV and Chronic IllnessComing Soon
Living Well With HIV
Shifts focus from medical management to designing a vibrant, joyful life centered on wellness, hope, and personal growth.
HIV-3.23 · In development
See all available kits
Pick a practice domain to see the 25 topics inside it, each with its learning objective and core focus areas.
HIV and Chronic Illness
25 topics
Featured kit, ready to order
HIV and Aging
Honoring Survivors, Building Whole-Person Wellness
More than half of people living with diagnosed HIV in the United States are now age 50 or older. This complete, facilitator-ready training kit helps frontline staff and peer leaders recognize the medical, cognitive, and emotional realities of aging with HIV, including AIDS Survivor Syndrome, and apply PAVE's R.A.C.E. framework and the MIPA principle to build programs that honor long-term survivors as experts, not afterthoughts. Grounded in HIV.gov, NIH HIVinfo, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
Provides accurate, foundational knowledge on HIV/AIDS transmission, prevention, and treatment, breaking down medical jargon.
Learning objective: Understand accurate, foundational knowledge about HIV and AIDS transmission, prevention, and treatment.
What skills you will learn: The difference between HIV and AIDS as a clinical stage, and how modern antiretroviral therapy controls the virus.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to correct misinformation and ground every future conversation about HIV in accurate science.
Coming SoonHIV-3.2
HIV Transmission Myths and Facts
Disarms widespread myths, misinformation, and outdated fears with scientific, up-to-date facts.
Learning objective: Learn accurate, current facts about HIV transmission to counter outdated myths.
What skills you will learn: How to clarify actual transmission routes, and how to dismantle common stigma-driven myths.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to educate communities and directly reduce the fear that fuels stigma.
Coming SoonHIV-3.3
Chronic Illness and Identity
Explores the emotional impact of a chronic diagnosis, guiding peers from grief to integrating the illness into a whole self.
Learning objective: Understand the emotional journey from diagnosis to a reclaimed, whole sense of identity.
What skills you will learn: How to support someone through grief over their pre-illness self, and how to help reframe diagnosis as something they manage.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to support someone integrating a diagnosis into their identity without letting it define them.
Coming SoonHIV-3.4
HIV Medication Overview
An accessible, patient-centered guide to modern HIV medications, detailing classes, regimens, and treatment goals.
Learning objective: Understand how modern HIV medications work and what treatment progress looks like in lab results.
What skills you will learn: How antiretroviral therapy blocks viral replication, and how to interpret viral load and CD4 counts.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to have informed, confidence-building conversations with someone starting or adjusting treatment.
Coming SoonHIV-3.5
HIV Medication Adherence Strategies
Equips peers with practical, trauma-informed tools and cognitive strategies to maintain perfect medication adherence.
Learning objective: Learn practical strategies for supporting consistent HIV medication adherence.
What skills you will learn: How to identify personal barriers to adherence, and how to anchor medication doses to daily routines.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to coach someone through the real-world challenges of staying consistent with treatment.
Coming SoonHIV-3.6
Side Effects and Management
Teaches participants how to identify, track, and manage physical and emotional side effects of chronic medications.
Learning objective: Learn to identify, track, and manage the side effects of HIV medications.
What skills you will learn: Practical, lifestyle-based tips for managing nausea, fatigue, and sleep disruptions, and how to communicate symptoms to a care team.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help someone stay on treatment by managing side effects instead of quietly stopping medication.
Coming SoonHIV-3.7
Mental Health and HIV
Addresses the intersection of chronic illness, anxiety, depression, and systemic stigma, offering whole-person coping tools.
Learning objective: Understand the intersection of chronic illness, mental health, and stigma in the lives of people living with HIV.
What skills you will learn: How chronic inflammation impacts emotional well-being, and whole-person coping strategies like somatic grounding.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to offer mental health support that accounts for the full physical and social reality of living with HIV.
Coming SoonHIV-3.9
Social Stigma Around HIV
Examines how systemic and self-stigma harm individuals, and provides strategies to build resilience and speak out.
Learning objective: Understand how systemic and internalized HIV stigma harm individuals, and how to build resilience against it.
What skills you will learn: How to identify and dismantle internalized stigma through self-compassion, and how to foster peer-led advocacy spaces.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help someone build resilience against stigma while also working to change it at a community level.
Coming SoonHIV-3.10
HIV and Intimacy and Relationships
A supportive guide to navigating dating, dating apps, sex, and love, with a focus on sexual health and confidence.
Learning objective: Learn to support someone navigating dating, intimacy, and relationships after an HIV diagnosis.
What skills you will learn: How U=U changes dating dynamics and sexual safety, and how to navigate serodiscordant relationships.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help someone rebuild confidence in their romantic and sexual life after diagnosis.
Coming SoonHIV-3.11
Disclosure and Confidentiality
Equips peers with strategies, boundary scripts, and legal knowledge to disclose their status safely and comfortably.
Learning objective: Learn to support someone making informed, safe decisions about disclosing their HIV status.
What skills you will learn: How to build a step-by-step disclosure plan, and HIPAA rights around personal health information.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help someone disclose on their own terms, safely and with legal understanding.
Coming SoonHIV-3.12
Building a Care Team
Teaches peers how to assemble a supportive, respectful network of medical, mental health, and social service providers.
Learning objective: Learn to help someone assemble a supportive, respectful care team.
What skills you will learn: How to identify key care team roles, and how to advocate for respectful treatment in clinical spaces.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help someone build a care network that actually collaborates on their behalf.
Coming SoonHIV-3.13
Nutrition and Immune Health
A practical exploration of how simple dietary choices strengthen immune function and gut wellness in chronic illness.
Learning objective: Understand how nutrition supports immune function and overall wellness in chronic illness.
What skills you will learn: How diet affects chronic inflammation and gut health, and affordable meal-prepping strategies.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help someone make practical, low-cost nutrition changes that support their immune health.
Coming SoonHIV-3.14
HIV and Co-Occurring Conditions
Navigates managing multiple health challenges alongside HIV, such as Hepatitis C, diabetes, and cardiovascular health.
Learning objective: Understand how to support someone managing HIV alongside other co-occurring chronic conditions.
What skills you will learn: How chronic immune activation affects cardiovascular and metabolic health, and how to coordinate care across multiple specialists.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help someone manage the added complexity of multiple diagnoses without feeling overwhelmed.
Coming SoonHIV-3.15
Coping With a New Diagnosis
A crisis-stabilization toolkit designed to guide individuals through the early weeks of receiving a positive test result.
Learning objective: Learn to provide crisis-stabilization support in the first weeks following a new HIV diagnosis.
What skills you will learn: How to de-escalate acute panic and normalize shock and fear, and how to connect someone to immediate medical and peer support.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to be a steady, informed presence for someone in the most disorienting early days after diagnosis.
Coming SoonHIV-3.16
Advances in HIV Treatment
An inspiring look at recent breakthroughs in therapeutics, including long-acting injectables and gene therapy.
Learning objective: Understand recent advances in HIV treatment and what they mean for people currently in care.
What skills you will learn: How long-acting injectable treatments work, and how to engage with clinical trial opportunities responsibly.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to share accurate, hopeful, up-to-date information about where treatment is headed.
Coming SoonHIV-3.17
Long-Term Survivorship
Honors and addresses the legacy, psychological resilience, and needs of individuals who have lived with HIV for decades.
Learning objective: Understand the psychological legacy and needs specific to long-term HIV survivors.
What skills you will learn: How to recognize AIDS Survivor Syndrome, and how to help someone reconnect with purpose and community in later years.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to honor long-term survivors as experts in their own experience, not an afterthought in program design.
Coming SoonHIV-3.18
HIV Prevention: PrEP and PEP
Details the medical strategies used to prevent HIV transmission, including Pre-Exposure and Post-Exposure Prophylaxis.
Learning objective: Understand how PrEP and PEP work as medical HIV prevention strategies.
What skills you will learn: How PrEP functions as ongoing prevention, and the urgent timeline for PEP after a potential exposure.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to raise awareness and connect people to prevention tools before or immediately after exposure.
Coming SoonHIV-3.19
HIV and Substance Use
Addresses the co-occurring challenges of active substance use and HIV management using a non-judgmental harm reduction lens.
Learning objective: Understand how active substance use and HIV management intersect, and how to support both without judgment.
What skills you will learn: How substance use impacts medication adherence and immune health, and harm reduction strategies specific to people living with HIV.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help someone re-engage with HIV care without waiting for abstinence first.
Coming SoonHIV-3.20
HIV in Marginalized Communities
Examines the social determinants of health and structural racism that cause high rates of HIV in vulnerable populations.
Learning objective: Understand the social determinants of health that drive disproportionate HIV rates in marginalized communities.
What skills you will learn: How poverty and housing instability increase transmission risk, and how to build culturally responsive peer support models.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to advocate for equitable resources instead of treating disparities as inevitable.
Coming SoonHIV-3.21
Advocacy and HIV Rights
Equips peers to participate in systemic advocacy, address legal discrimination, and defend their healthcare rights.
Learning objective: Learn the legal protections and advocacy tools available to defend the rights of people living with HIV.
What skills you will learn: Legal protections under the ADA, and how to engage with advocacy organizations to drive policy change.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help someone recognize and respond to discrimination instead of accepting it as normal.
Coming SoonHIV-3.22
HIV and Loneliness in Aging
Focuses on building social connection and peer-led spaces to address isolation among older survivors.
Learning objective: Understand the specific drivers of loneliness among older HIV survivors and how to address them.
What skills you will learn: How generational grief and societal neglect contribute to isolation, and practical peer-driven models for building social circles.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help build real community for older survivors, not just clinical check-ins.
Coming SoonHIV-3.23
Living Well With HIV
Shifts focus from medical management to designing a vibrant, joyful life centered on wellness, hope, and personal growth.
Learning objective: Learn to support someone building a full, joyful life alongside HIV management, not just around it.
What skills you will learn: How to set aspirational life goals beyond medical appointments, and how peer mentorship models hope for others.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to help someone shift their focus from managing illness to actively living well.
Coming SoonHIV-3.24
Building Resilience With Chronic Illness
Provides a clear framework for building psychological resilience, self-efficacy, and a positive outlook.
Learning objective: Learn a practical framework for building resilience and self-efficacy while living with chronic illness.
What skills you will learn: Daily gratitude and mindfulness practices for grounding during flares, and how peer communities build collective resilience.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this framework to help someone build real, sustainable resilience rather than just pushing through.
Coming SoonHIV-3.25
The Future of HIV Cure Research
An educational, science-grounded overview of ongoing scientific efforts toward an absolute cure for HIV.
Learning objective: Understand the current state of HIV cure research in clear, accurate terms.
What skills you will learn: The difference between a sterilizing cure and a functional cure, and how to access reliable research instead of online cure scams.
How this applies in the field: Any peer can use this to answer questions about cure research honestly, without overpromising or spreading misinformation.
