Cheetah House Care Team: Pathways and Requirements
Cheetah House supports individuals navigating severe distress from meditation, spiritual practices, or religious trauma. Because our work touches acute and complex vulnerability, Care Team membership is an invitation-only service role with an exceptionally high barrier to entry.
1. Peer-Support Model
Cheetah House follows a peer-support framework. All Care Team members have personal lived experience of acute meditation crises or spiritual/religious trauma. While some members hold professional clinical credentials, they serve at Cheetah House as peer supporters, not as practicing clinicians.
2. Multi-Year Community Immersion and Nomination
Care Team selection is a multi-year relational process, not a job application or recruitment track. Candidates are invited only after the broader community—including Care Team members, board members, and fellow clients—has gotten to know them deeply over months and years.
Eligibility requires extensive, long-term participation in Cheetah House services, typically including:
Completing 20+ individual consultations and attending 50+ support groups as a client.
Presenting a lecture in the "Letters to My Former Self" series, sharing what they learned with those currently navigating a crisis.
Demonstrating organic peer leadership: becoming a trusted presence whose perspective other clients naturally seek out and value.
An invitation to the Care Team requires independent nomination by two Care Team members and a unanimous vote by the entire team.
Individuals who had only a few consultations, or recovered meditators who were not active clients, are not eligible unless they undergo deep, long-term immersion in the Cheetah House community services so members can get to know them.
3. Training is a Requirement, Not a Pathway
All Care Team members must complete the full 100+ hour Cheetah House First Do No Harm Meditation Safety Training (50 hours didactics, 50 hours practicum). However, completing this training is not a pathway or application track to becoming a Care Team member.
4. Service Ethos & Compensation
Care Team members serve to pay forward the profound care they received—turning what was once the most painful or isolating period of their lives into a source of hope for others.
Service Over Employment: While client hours are compensated, being on the Care Team is a vocation of service, not a primary career. No one makes a living on the Care Team; all members maintain outside primary employment and see Cheetah House clients fewer than 10 hours per week.
Unpaid Contributions: Members also contribute uncompensated time to essential team duties, including peer supervision and administrative committees.
5. External Clinicians & The Helper Directory
Because we are a peer-support model, practicing clinicians—whether or not they have personal lived experience—are not eligible to join the Care Team as clinicians. Instead, clinicians who complete the Cheetah House First Do No Harm training may join the Cheetah House Helper Directory, an external referral list where we direct clients seeking formal psychotherapy or specialized medical care.