The Lay Counselor Academy — Self-Paced
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A training program in its fourth year.

Learn to sit with someone who is suffering, without making it worse.

A serious, paced training program for peer counselors, sponsors, and volunteer listeners. Taught by people who have done this work for decades.

Read the sample lesson or enroll now

The lesson is called Listening without fixing. It's Lesson 1 of the Foundations module.

A lay counselor speaking and gesturing with her hand on her heart during a session
Featured in

In our experience, most people who find the LCA are already deeply thoughtful communicators. You're probably the person in your family, in your community, in your friend group that people turn to when they need support. You've probably been surprised by how many personal things people tell you. You've heard, more than once, that you're easy to talk to. This program is for you. It begins where your instincts leave off.

We trust you. Take what you need. Leave the rest.

A cohort of Lay Counselor Academy graduates standing together after their training
An LCA cohort at the conclusion of their training.
A community health worker in a moment of conversation

Plain language

What is a lay counselor?

Lay counselors are trained people who provide mental health support without a clinical license. They sit with people in hard moments and offer empathic, evidence-based care, bridging gaps that licensed clinicians alone cannot fill.

Learn more

Courses and certifications

What is the Lay Counselor Academy?

The academy is a program that equips you, or your staff, with practical mental health counseling skills. Two LCA courses and a Community Health Worker certification, all building from the same foundation.

  1. The LCA: Self-Paced

    A fully asynchronous course. Foundational mental health counseling skills on your own schedule. Deep and wide, covering everything you need for essential counseling.

    You are here

  2. The LCA: Live

    Our flagship course. Fourteen weeks of live, practice-based learning with a cohort of peers. Includes five personal counseling sessions.

    Contact us to register

  3. CHW Certification, with a Mental Health Specialty

    Community Health Worker certification with an emphasis on mental health. Learn all CHW core competencies plus how to provide mental health counseling.

    Contact us to register

Listen to Co-Creators Elizabeth Morrison & Alli Moreno share the story and the mission behind The Lay Counselor Academy.

Who teaches

Two teachers, named.

The academy is small on purpose. You learn from people who are still doing the work, not from a faceless platform.

Photograph of Elizabeth Morrison

Elizabeth Morrison

PhD, LCSW, MAC. Founder.

Elizabeth has practiced clinical social work for over twenty years, in California's public health system, in community mental health, and in private practice. She founded The Lay Counselor Academy in 2021 after seeing that the people most likely to help someone in a hard moment are rarely clinicians. She writes, teaches, and has been featured in STAT News, the Modesto Bee, and an external evaluation by the California Health Care Foundation.

Read more about Elizabeth
Photograph of Alli Moreno

Alli Moreno

Co-Creator. Flourish Counselor Emeritus.

Alli co-created the academy with Elizabeth and teaches alongside her across the program. She brings the lived practice of peer counseling to the curriculum and helps shape how the material lands for working adults who are not in clinical roles. The Steinberg Institute named her and Elizabeth 2023 Champions for this work.

Read more about Alli

Why it works

Benefits of having lay counselors.

  • Meet patient, client, or student needs safely and promptly.

  • Elevate your most dedicated, skillful employees.

  • Disseminate core behavioral health counseling skills throughout your organization.

  • Fill gaps where licensed professionals are scarce.

  • Offer more bilingual and culturally congruent care options.

  • Expand mental health services efficiently.

Hands down the most valuable course I've ever taken. I use the mental health counseling skills I learned in the LCA every day, with my patients but also at home.
Oscar, LCA participant.

The curriculum

Seven modules. Fourteen sessions. Seventy hours, paced for evenings and weekends.

The course is fully asynchronous. You read, watch, listen, and write through it on your own schedule, with learning checks built in. The modules are sequential, but they're also a curriculum you'll return to.

  1. Module 1

    Foundations of Lay Counseling

    What lay counseling is, why it matters, and how to grow into it without losing yourself. Includes a serious look at bias, stigma, and the ways our judgments quietly enter the room.

    Read the module

  2. Module 2

    Core Counseling Approaches

    A home stance you return to in every session: warm body language, open questions, reflection, affirming strengths, and the practice of countering shame.

    Read the module

  3. Module 3

    Working with Thoughts, Depression, and Anxiety

    How to work with someone's thinking without trying to argue them out of pain, with cognitive tools, a parts-of-self framework, and a practical guide to the symptoms of depression and anxiety.

    Read the module

  4. Module 4

    Positive Psychology and Staying on Fertile Ground

    Evidence-based happiness practices, the kind of cheerfulness that makes things worse, and how to guide someone back to the ground where growth is actually possible.

    Read the module

  5. Module 5

    Motivational Interviewing, Addiction, and Difficult Childhoods

    Sitting with addiction and adverse childhood experience without judgment, the classical techniques of motivational interviewing, and how to keep this work from quietly costing you.

    Read the module

  6. Module 6

    Suicidal Thoughts, Reporting, and Identity

    How to hold the hardest conversations, what mandated reporting actually means, and how your own identity and your counselee's identity show up in the room together.

    Read the module

  7. Module 7

    Boundaries, Endings, and Continuing to Learn

    What you owe the people you sit with, what you owe yourself, the ethics of self-disclosure, and how to end a counseling relationship with care.

    Read the module

Full module objectives and session-by-session detail live on the curriculum page.

What you actually get

Inside the Self-Paced course.

One thousand two hundred dollars buys you the whole library and everything below. Buy once, return forever.

  • Seventy hours, self-paced

    Seven modules and fourteen sessions, paced for evenings and weekends. Move as fast or as slowly as you need.

  • Read, listen, or watch

    Every lesson is a written essay with a recorded audio version and a short video. Learn on a walk, in the car, or with a notebook open.

  • Quizzes and writing prompts

    Multiple-choice and true-or-false checks reinforce the concepts. Open-ended prompts invite you to write through your own practice.

  • A built-in AI study partner

    A self-contained AI inside the course responds to your written reflections and helps you reason about what you've learned.

  • A community of peer counselors

    An in-course discussion board with fellow graduates and current learners. People who do this work, talking to each other about it.

  • Lifetime access and a certificate

    Finish the program and receive a certificate to share. Every future update to the curriculum is included at no additional cost.

Read the sample lesson

Listening without fixing.

Foundations, Lesson 1. Taught by Elizabeth Morrison.

The opening of the lesson is on the right. Drop your email and we will send the full version straight to your inbox.

One email. No upsells. Unsubscribe any time.

Cover of the California Health Care Foundation's 2025 evaluation report of The Lay Counselor Academy

An external evaluation

The California Health Care Foundation evaluated the academy in 2025.

Their report concluded that lay counselor training, done seriously, can meaningfully expand the mental health workforce in communities where licensed clinicians are scarce. It also examined how graduates use the material in their working lives, and which kinds of organizations have sent staff through the program.

We think it's the most honest outside look at the work this academy does. We'd rather you read it than take our word for any of this.

Read the evaluation

In the press

What the press are saying about our work.

Take it with you

Get a copy of the LCA book.

Three hundred pages of LCA articles, the same essays we use to teach the basics of mental health counseling. Sold at cost: just printing and shipping. Available in English and Spanish.

Read more

See below for more information.

  1. LCA Live FAQs & Costs

    Download

  2. LCA Course Options

    Download

  3. LCA Self-Paced FAQs

    Download

  4. LCA Self-Paced Details

    Download

What it costs

Two ways to learn. Same craft.

The Self-Paced course is fully asynchronous — start any time, work at your own pace. The Live cohort runs fourteen weeks with a group and includes personal counseling sessions. Same curriculum, different cadence.

Enroll in Self-Paced See full pricing

Organizations enrolling twenty or more people: [email protected]