The Happier Life Project is developing a peer-run behavioral health and recovery continuum beginning with Krystal’s Place, a six-bed peer respite in Riverside County, and expanding through the planned HARVEST Campus in Anza. Built around lived experience, choice, culture, and community, the model creates welcoming alternatives to institutional care for people experiencing behavioral health and recovery challenges. HARVEST will expand this vision into a rural recovery and wellness campus integrating peer respite, outpatient and recovery supports, justice-focused services, holistic wellness, and pathways back to stable community life. Together, these projects demonstrate how peer-led organizations can own and operate the community infrastructure needed to prevent unnecessary hospitalization, incarceration, homelessness, and disconnection.

The Happier Life Project’s Adult Reentry Program provides transitional housing and peer-led recovery, case management, employment, and reintegration support for justice-impacted adults returning to the community. The program helps participants stabilize housing, rebuild life skills, connect to employment and healthcare, address barriers to successful reentry, and develop long-term pathways toward recovery, independence, and community belonging. By combining housing with lived-experience-driven support, THLP works to reduce the cycle of homelessness, incarceration, and disconnection that often follows reentry.

The Happier Life Project provides culturally responsive, peer-led prevention, mentoring, behavioral health, leadership, and community diversion services for youth through partnerships with schools, juvenile probation, foster youth systems, families, and community organizations. Programming includes one-to-one mentoring, recovery and wellness education, culturally rooted healing practices, youth leadership and civic engagement, restorative and prosocial activities, career and life-skills exploration, and community-based alternatives to deeper justice-system involvement. Our goal is to strengthen protective factors, belonging, identity, resilience, and positive adult relationships while creating pathways that keep young people connected to school, family, community, and opportunity.