But the center’s experts don’t demonstrate their credentials with gold-sealed diplomas framed on the wall. They earned their expertise from years of living through their own mental illness and emerging with enough street smarts to help others along the same journey.

“They understand how the system works and doesn’t work and can find a way through it better than some professional people,” said Lyle Stork, director of the drop-in center that’s housed in a former warehouse in downtown Bellingham.

Known as peer advocates, their tasks include helping members find housing and health care, applying for government assistance, establishing long-term recovery plans — or just listening and providing words of encouragement on a particularly rough day.

They’re “there for people in ways a family would be there for people,” said Charles Albertson, the center’s lead peer advocate.

Stork, the center’s director since soon after it opened in 1998, has the final word over the center’s operations, but he leaves many of the day-to-day operations to the center’s peer advocates, who undergo 24 hours of training to augment their hard-earned street smarts of the mental-health system.

“I’ll err on the side of expecting a lot from peers,” he said, “because I believe they can handle most things.”

Member Richard “Max” Wahl, 47, agreed.

Wahl, whose mental illness contributed to his 30-plus years of homelessness, said he’s been tempted to give up many times. But the support and advice from peer advocates, from phone calls on his behalf to simple words of encouragement, have kept him on track, he said.

It didn’t take Wahl long to get over his initial skepticism that people with mental illness could really help him. He calls Rainbow Center “a place where I could feel safe and secure.”

The center has also changed his life. Wahl just moved in to a federally subsidized Section 8 apartment.

“Sometimes, I have a hard time expressing myself, so I asked if (the peer advocates) could talk to them for me,” Wahl said.

Peer advocates also visit mentally ill people in places like the hospital and the jail, encouraging them to join the center to help them get back on their feet.

And they talk with area merchants, students and others in hopes of tearing down misconceptions about mental illness.

“It’s up to us as mentally ill people to let the community know we’re not violent and we’re not stupid,” said Russ Sapienza, another peer advocate.

For some people, the peer advocates at the Rainbow Center are the only connection they have to the mental-health system.

“The rules for (publicly funded) Medicaid are so strict, people can be pretty sick and not qualify for Medicaid,” said Albertson, who became lead peer advocate about a year ago, soon after his predecessor left to attend graduate school in social work.

“We’re going to have to find those services another way, or manage to get along without them. Peers know of resources sometimes that other people don’t know of,” he said.

That’s what makes peer advocate programs so important, said Karie Castleberry, senior program administrator with the mental-health division of the Department of Social and Health Services.

“There’s more integrity and sincerity in hearing … from someone who has been there and done that, as opposed to hearing from a masters-degreed clinician, sitting in an office,” Castleberry said.

The state is putting the finishing touches on a certification process that will allow peer advocates to bill Medicaid for their work, Castleberry said. About 100 people will go through the training this year, she said.

That certification, and those in other states, will likely only encourage the use of peer advocates and counselors. That’s good news, as long as states don’t embrace peer support simply as a money-saving measure, said Phyllis Solomon a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania.

While there aren’t solid scientific studies on the effectiveness of peer support, research indicates peers can deliver social services as well as those without mental health diagnoses.

“These are people who have been through the same experiences themselves and come out the other end somewhat more successful,” Solomon said. “They give people a sense of recovery and an idea of how to go about doing it.”

And when peer advocates work alongside traditional counselors, they can change their colleagues’ opinion about the possibility of recovery from mental illness, Solomon said. That can have a profound effect on the treatment they provide.

At Rainbow Center, peer advocates are finding the lives they change may be their own.

“Having this job has made me a lot happier,” said Albertson, the lead peer advocate.

Albertson has a master’s degree in agronomy, but had to leave behind his career in agriculture several years ago because of the stress.

“I thought everything was over,” he said. “I wasn’t doing anything productive for a long time. But it’s not over for me, and it looks like it won’t be over for a long time.”