Behavioral health tax dollars seeded growth of peer support community in Larimer County

Yarrow Collective providing non-clinical alternatives for individuals unable, apprehensive to seek traditional care

Brittani Moore was juggling single parenting, involvement with the criminal and child welfare systems, homelessness, and a cycle of addiction and sobriety. She described herself as a “menace” in Larimer County.

But she has since relinquished the title, with support from the community she once strained and through the transformational experience of peer support. 

“I didn’t know there was a way out until Larimer County cared more about my life than I did,” said the mother of two.

Her turning point came when she applied for one of the 8th Judicial District’s problem-solving courts and was connected with a family therapist at The Willow Collective, a Fort Collins-based provider specializing in prenatal, infant, and early childhood mental health.

From there, she met Ashleigh Jones, training director and a co-founder of The Yarrow Collective. Jones visited her at home with her newborn daughter, who is now 1.

“She didn’t pressure me to talk or answer questions,” Moore said. She just got it. 

“I look up to her,” she said, and started thinking, “I can do this. I can be honest. I feel safe in my sobriety.”

Moore is part of a growing number of people benefiting from peer support – a non-clinical, non-coercive model where people with lived experience in mental health or substance use walk alongside others in recovery.

Peer support may go back nearly 300 years, but its recent expansion in Larimer County is partially due to taxpayer-funded behavioral health investments and one organization in particular: Fort Collins-based nonprofit organization The Yarrow Collective.

Taking root in Larimer County 

The Yarrow Collective offers non-clinical peer support groups for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC); trans and nonbinary individuals; chronically ill/disabled community members, and members of other underserved populations who are struggling with unmet mental health needs and may be unable or apprehensive to seek traditional behavioral health services. 

“I think the story of Yarrow Collective is the story of the Impact Fund,” said Dr. Shannon Hughes, a co-founder and member of The Yarrow Collective’s Partnership Team, who writes grants and provides program support. 

Larimer County’s Behavioral Health Services Department invests dedicated tax dollars in the expansion and enhancement of mental health and substance-use care. Thanks to a forward-thinking decision by voters in 2018, 25 cents of every $100 spent in the county goes toward that purpose. 

BHS has invested $17.7 million in 77 unique organizations over the past seven years through its annual Impact Fund Grant Program. One of the program’s targeted funding areas is "Services in Diverse Settings," as prioritized by BHS advisory groups. That investment area has grown over the years.

Among the fund’s initial grant recipients in 2020, Hughes was awarded $150,000 to expand peer support in Larimer County, along with the network of professionals doing work in the recovery space. The project focused on meeting increasing demand for training.

But what started six years ago, with a few people meeting in a CSU classroom to plan, has since grown into a full-fledged nonprofit with a blossoming team and overall budget exceeding $1 million.

“It was just the right idea, at the right time, and the right need,” Hughes said. 

The modern peer support movement was born from the 1960s-era psychiatric survivor movement, led by those who called themselves “ex-patients.” 

During the deinstitutionalization movement, community-based centers opened as state-run mental institutions shuttered their doors. Ex-patients began to find one another, in church basements and living rooms, sharing stories about harm they suffered as a result of traditional behavioral health care. 

They believed healing doesn’t happen in therapeutic settings alone. And the power imbalance favoring clinicians shifted when patients started supporting patients, using lived experiences to learn from each other and move forward in their healing together. 

“Community building is the medicine,” said Silen Wellington, The Yarrow Collective’s executive director and a certified peer specialist. 

“Nothing about us without us” is a core principle in peer support. Born from the disability justice movement, it means those with firsthand experience are the experts and should be at the center of the creation of legislation, policies, and services – rather than being spoken for by others.

“We get to say what we want and don’t want versus what the system tells us we need,” said Zalena Ferguson, Yarrow’s family services team lead and a peer advocate. “We can tell this story.” 

That autonomy looks different for everyone – from choosing what medications go into your body or not, to sitting with a friend by the river to heal and navigate suicidal thoughts or seeking treatment at a hospital. All options are valid.

In addition to running groups and doing one-on-one peer support, Ferguson facilitates the Alternatives to Suicide Peer Support Group for Adults. The program is made possible, in part, by Behavioral Health Services Impact Fund grant dollars. 

Some people show up for a couple of sessions, while others come back week after week for years. Ferguson sees the “beauty of people coming together to talk about what it means to live and die,” and knows firsthand how powerful that can be, as a person with lived experience with suicide. 

“I’m somebody who peer support saved my life,” Ferguson said.

Growing in community, with the community 

Sitting with Yarrow staff and program participants as they shared their experiences looked a lot different in October 2025 than it would have a year ago. That’s because the organization moved into a mixed-use complex just west of the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery. 

Wellington, the executive director, led a tour of the office that became Yarrow’s home sometime around spring-to-summer 2025. It has a group meeting space, community resource wall and kitchen, and is made welcoming by woven artwork, plants, candles, incense, and strings of dried marigolds.

Notably, there is no yarrow. The medicinal plant doesn’t like pots but can likely be found nearby, Wellington speculates, peering north out of the front door toward Lee Martinez Park and beyond.

Although physically absent, the essence of its healing powers felt omni-present in each person’s stories about the impact of Yarrow Collective.

Emma Garcia was 17 years old when she attended an event put on by a Yarrow Collective team member at her Fort Collins high school. Four years later, the people in her peer support groups have become her “chosen family.” 

They showed up for her in court when she feared facing an abusive partner, helped her navigate struggles with addiction and grief, and watched her grow up as she was “learning how to be an adult, a better-functioning human being.” 

It surprised her to find she had things in common with people in their 60s. But having shared experiences in a supportive community with access to the same healing tools and strategies – that’s the democratization of care embedded in the peer support model – has been more than beneficial.

“Throughout my time spent within community circles, I found people that generously lent me their voice until I could find my own,” she said. That, and it’s been life-changing to receive free (community-funded) services that she wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford.

Brittani Moore was technically seated with the others around a long, rectangular table in Yarrow Collective’s office, her face and voice visibly and audibly present on a glowing screen. It was important to her that she talked about Yarrow Collective’s positive impact, even though she was home caring for an ill child.

Near the end of the meeting, everyone was asked: What does it mean to you that Larimer County values behavioral health care so much that voters approved a dedicated sales-use tax to support it? 

“It gives me hope for my kids, you know, for their mental health,” said Moore, which is vastly different from growing up in the 1990s, she said, when even talking about mental health was still taboo.

Hughes added: “The community didn’t know, specifically, what would be funded” through the Impact Fund Grant Program, but they put money behind valuing all of us being OK. We’re in this together. (Mental illness and substance use) it touches all of us.” 

Because of that, she and other members of the Yarrow Collective community are grateful to continue building “resilient communities and webs of support.”