Hi Rey;
It is an excellent and frustrating point. There are many pockets of excellence in peer support in many places. At the Centre for Innovation in Peer Support, Christina and myself, along with Robyn Priest who does peer support in 11 countries have been exploring and connecting and trying to bridge to all; so we can create a unified and collective impact. We work in alliance with Ontario Peer Support Initiative (OPDI), Peer Support Canada (formerly Peer Support Accreditation & Certification Canada), Centre for Excellence in Peer Support of Waterloo/Wellington and many other peer experts.
What we have discovered is that to create the "evidence" that will be accepted as evidence and therefore be able to actually drive policy, governance, planning and funding means "we" have to follow research methodology/rigour for it to go through the processes to "grow up" into evidence. That is why we needed a formal literature review provided by EENet that looked at the accepted academic literature published in peer reviewed journals. Thanks so much for posting about those two great resources.