Crisis Workers & Peer Support Specialists
The most independent role in behavioral health, with the most backup.
Maine’s newest Crisis Receiving Center opens in Bangor in July 2026. We’re hiring two roles that work side by side every day: Crisis Workers and Peer Support Specialists.
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Two Paths into the Same Mission
The Crisis Receiving Center is built around a team-based model. Crisis Workers and Peer Support Specialists are different roles with different qualifications and different lenses on the work, but they sit at the same table, every shift, working with the same eight people in the same building. Both roles are described below.
Peer Support Specialists bring something the rest of the team can’t: lived experience. You’ve been through your own version of what the people walking through the door are facing, and you’re certified to put that experience to use. Your role isn’t clinical. It’s mutual. You meet people where they are, often in the moments where a clinical conversation isn’t yet possible.
Maine is actively expanding the role of peer support across crisis services, and CHCS has been hiring peers successfully for years. The Crisis Receiving Center is the next chapter, typically two peers on shift at a time, working alongside crisis workers and nurses. Intentional Peer Support certification must be obtained within the first 180 days of employment. Hourly rate of pay is $20.00.
Crisis Workers are the operational backbone of the center. You’ll conduct biopsychosocial assessments, lead safety planning conversations, provide lethal means counseling, coordinate referrals, and consult with clinical staff throughout each shift. The work is paced by the people in front of you, sometimes intense, sometimes quiet, never the same two days in a row.
It’s the most independent role in the center. It’s also the most supported. You’ll have clinical consultants on call, a supervisor who knows the work, and a team of peers and nurses on shift with you. For Crisis Workers who later decide to pursue master’s-level clinical work, this role is one of the strongest entry points in the state.
The starting annual salary is $57,969 MHRT/CSP certification or eligibility required. Must have a minimum of credits equivalent to an Associate’s Degree in a relevant field of study. Employees who have not completed the MHRT/CSP certificate must successfully obtain certification within 90 days of employment.
What both roles share
✔ A team of three to five staff per shift.
✔ Warm handoffs into the broader CHCS system of care, not discharges into the unknown.
✔ A maximum of eight people in the center at any time.
✔ A career path inside a 140-year-old institution that hires people back: roughly 15–16% of current CHCS staff are people who left and came back.
About CHCS
Community Health and Counseling Services (CHCS) has been serving Maine since 1883. As a Certified Community Behavioral Health Center, CHCS provides same-day and next-day access alongside Crisis Residential Units Sojourn and Safe Harbour, the Children’s Behaioral Health Urgent Care Clinic, and the existing mobile crisis team.
The Crisis Receiving Center is a new program, that sits inside a well-established system of care. You won’t be discharging clients into uncertainty. You’ll be handing them off to a team that’s already there and interconnected.