Helping Peer Recovery Contract Managers Recognize and Respond to Workforce Strain

A training for the state’s contract- and grant-management team, giving them shared language for burnout, secondary trauma, and moral injury and helping them identify where individuals, teams, and the organization could respond.

At a Glance

Client: State of Michigan

Sector: Public-Health

Format: 75-min virtual

Audience: Contract/Grant Managers

What we noticed

Contract and grant managers who oversee peer recovery work are rarely included in conversations about workforce strain. Their roles are often understood as administrative, even though the work requires them to manage complex relationships, respond when problems arise, navigate competing expectations, and remain accountable for work taking place across multiple organizations.

They also work in close proximity to systems shaped by crisis, substance use, recovery, and significant human need. Yet they may have little shared language for naming how that work affects them or for distinguishing ordinary stress from burnout, secondary trauma, or moral injury.

Without that language, strain can remain invisible until it begins affecting communication, decision-making, relationships with grantees, or the team’s ability to respond consistently.

The intervention

We designed From Strain to Support, a 75-minute virtual training built around priorities the leadership team identified during planning: trauma-informed practice, sustainable self-care, and practical ways to recognize and respond to strain.

The session helped participants distinguish burnout, secondary trauma, and moral injury, three patterns that are often grouped together as general stress despite having different causes and requiring different responses.

Participants then worked in small groups to identify the conditions contributing to each form of strain and consider where individuals, teams, and the organization had influence. The session concluded with a written report to leadership outlining the themes that surfaced and identifying areas where further organizational action could make a difference.

Why we designed it this way

We deliberately included contract and grant managers in the conversation about strain rather than treating them only as the people responsible for monitoring performance, managing agreements, and supporting grantees.

Their work involves more than administration. They make judgment calls, manage difficult relationships, respond to emerging problems, and operate within structures where responsibility and authority are not always evenly matched. Those conditions can create forms of strain that individual self-care alone cannot resolve.

For that reason, the session moved beyond personal coping strategies to examine the design of the work itself: workload, accountability, authority, communication, organizational support, and the expectations placed on the team. This created space to identify decisions leaders could make, rather than leaving each person to manage structural pressures privately.

Questions for Consideration
  • How do organizations account for the strain carried in oversight and stewardship roles when that labor is classified as administrative rather than recognized as a form of care work?
  • When responsibility for a system’s wellbeing is distributed across many people, what determines whether care becomes someone’s explicit responsibility rather than no one’s?
  • How much occupational strain comes from the work itself, and how much is produced by the structures around it, including caseload, authority, and accountability?
  • What would change if sustainability were treated as a feature of system design rather than as a personal capacity individuals are expected to maintain?

SELECTED ARTIFACTS