Cheryl Hahn

Cheryl R. Hahn, CRSS, CPRS, is a peer leader and mental health systems advocate with extensive experience advancing recovery-oriented services and workforce development in Illinois. She currently serves as President of the Illinois Alliance of Peer Professionals (IAPP), a statewide peer-led professional association focused on strengthening, connecting, and advocating for the peer workforce.

With over a decade of leadership in peer support services, Cheryl’s work spans crisis respite programming, drop-in center development, and peer workforce supervision. She supervises a multidisciplinary peer team within a Living Room crisis respite program at Kenneth Young Center, where she supports the implementation of trauma-informed, non-coercive alternatives to traditional psychiatric crisis care.

Cheryl brings lived experience of serious mental illness to her leadership, which informs her commitment to expanding dignity-centered, community-based supports and strengthening the role of peer professionals in behavioral health systems. She has served in leadership roles across nonprofit and healthcare settings, including Northwestern Medicine and Trilogy Behavioral Healthcare, and has held governance and advisory roles focused on workforce development and system transformation.

Her advocacy centers on building sustainable career pathways for peer specialists, advancing equity in mental health policy, and elevating lived experience as essential expertise in behavioral health leadership.