Peer Leader Letters ALAN RICHARDSON
What could we learn from being Peer Leaders in a school environment that could apply to supporting the wellbeing of our families, friends, and neighbours during this Pandemic? Likely the best place to start answering this question is to look at what we do as Peer Leaders, both in our school communities, and in our neighbourhoods. In schools (as you all know), we mentor peers younger than us at the beginning of their high school years. We do this through facilitating workshops with them on areas of personal development important to any person’s social/emotional growth. The mentoring is done through sharing our learnings from the different exercises in each workshop. This sharing is a more equitable way to nurture each person’s thinking and personal growth because it avoids the feeling so often associated with ‘top down’ mentoring, namely that we’re working from deficits in our own or other’s characters. We take this Peer Leadership approach to mentoring through facilitation knowing that everyone is different in so many ways. Some of us are more vulnerable, more hurting, more gifted, more capable of learning, or more mature in group settings at this time in their lives. The differences ultimately don’t matter because these areas of social/emotional development are common to us all. And when a person needs to grow in a certain area of their life, they will. And our workshops have introduced them to some of the key dynamics in each of these areas.
