Pathways Peer Advocacy started in the Fall of 2011 as a student-led peer emotional support line. The program encourages Geneseo students to call, chat, or email about any personal issue that they want to discuss, from relationship issues to academic stress to more serious mental health concerns. Peer advocates are careful not to give advice; instead, they encourage the student to decide what’s right for them by facilitating brainstorming or providing relevant online, and on/off campus resources. For more serious situations, such as suicide, sexual assault, or interpersonal violence, peer advocates enter a crisis protocol if they recognize certain triggers. To ensure that students feel comfortable calling other students and to maintain an ethical standard, Pathways is completely confidential.
In order to become a peer advocate, students must complete an intensive 10-week training program taught by current Pathways members. Over the course of those ten weeks, they learn skills such as paraphrasing, active listening, effectively conveying empathy, cultural responsiveness, and following proper crisis protocols. Then, trainees participate in two simulated on call nights, where they are evaluated to determine if they will be a welcoming and competent peer advocate. Once in the program, peer advocates are on-call one night per week and take part in other activities within the program, such as training potential new members and advertising Pathways services. Each of a peer advocate’s first two semesters counts as three credits toward the Psychology major and one semester of Pathways plus passing Clinical Psychology qualifies toward the Applied Helping Skills micro credential.
Dr. Jennifer Katz has been faculty advisor for Pathways since the start of the program and she does an excellent job of supporting peer advocates. I wanted to get her insight into running a student led campus program and how Pathways addresses student mental health needs. The following is a transcript of our discussion, which has been edited in some places for clarity and length.
What led you to start Pathways?
Students were very concerned about after-hours support options. It was the 2010-2011 academic year and people were like, if it’s after four o’clock, there’s nowhere to go. What if we need help? What are we supposed to do? And so some students in my Clinical Psych class were like, what we could do? Maybe, we could be available to refer people to where to go on campus. So then somebody brought that up and I was like, I’ll hold a meeting if people want to come. We can figure it out. And 10 or 12 people came and we talked about it, and we were all like, we can do this. So it was a student idea, and you know, I tried to provide a lot of support and guidance but really students came up with all the details. Like, using Google Voice and figuring out what are the kinds of things we want to be prepared to do. I had previously worked at a suicide talk line as a volunteer and I used some of my experiences there and lots of readings and we all worked on different areas and then we had a weeklong retreat before the semester to set it up. And we did it and we were like, okay now were going to try to train everyone in these skills that we learned in Clinical Psych and see if we can do it. So that’s how it started. It was very student led and very, very collaborative.
What were some of the biggest obstacles at the beginning?
There were tons of obstacles. One of them was people were worried that students wouldn’t be qualified. So we had this whole promise about doing objective evaluations to ensure the students would be qualified and there were concerns that if students called peer advocates to describe let’s say, a sexual assault, that [the student] would feel that they were reporting it to the college. But they weren’t reporting it to the college because they were reporting to students in a help line. So, like, what would happen then, and, you know, what should be done? There was also a lot of concern about peer advocates potentially mishandling situations such that there would be liability for the college. There was also a thing that happened where I had originally envisioned peer advocacy as being supplements to resident advisors (RAs), like the RA equivalent but for off-campus students. We’ve had over the years RA’s be peer advocates and that’s been really good but initially there were concerns about stepping on RA’s or something. We actually got a lot of calls from RA’s because RA’s don’t have RA’s. So there was the period of time where like we were supporting RA’s in that way and we were also doing programs, like with RA’s, and we would advertise our services. Especially early, early on.
How has the program changed since you first started it?
Lot of changes and a non-exhaustive list includes, we didn’t used to have people do practice outside of training sessions. The very first semester that we did evaluation sessions, the first time that they were ever called was the evaluation. We used to have in person drop-in hours, but no one ever came so we didn’t do those anymore. We used to be part of the sexual assault response team, but it was used so infrequently that we don’t do that, and we don’t actually have a sexual assault response team anymore. We used to partner with the alcohol and other drugs office. There were like AOD advocates but the person that ran that retired, and we also didn’t have enough people to be able to do that anymore. We learned not to have more than four people in a training group because nobody would get enough individualized attention. We definitely improved our evaluation procedures. Peer advocates, once they got in, initially they didn’t do practice buddies, and we realized at some point and that oh no we need to keep this up. And then there was some resistance and people were like, we don’t want to do that. So those were some of the, say, major changes. Oh, and we used to be on call on the weekends. It was actually a pretty recent thing that we are not on call on the weekends. People volunteered weekend time. We don’t do that anymore.
What do you think is the most important consideration when addressing student mental health, in terms of peer advocates.
So I don’t know if this totally answers it, but we thought about how a lot of people who would benefit from talking to a professional counselor find that idea very intimidating and that [this program] would be like a bridge. Like a person could call and talk to a peer who would be caring and non-judgmental and that experience would ease the way for, if people have mental health concerns and would benefit from mental health treatment, that that would help facilitate that reach out because they would have had a positive initial reach out experience. Not everyone who contacts peer advocates is struggling with mental health issues but for the ones who might or who might benefit from professional level treatment we hoped that we would be like a soft start, if you will.
Finally, what would you say to someone who might be interested in starting something similar at their school/college?
There would need to be a faculty or staff person in place to be coordinating things. You know, there’s been a couple of folks who were peer advocates who went on to other schools and they were like, oh we should start this here at you know, Nazareth [University] or whatever. I talked to some folks at other places, but it was like the students wanted it but the people at the college didn’t necessarily want it. It’s kind of a funny thing because people perceive it as my program and in a way it’s my program in that I’ve been consistently like in it but it’s not really my program. I didn’t develop it, I co-developed it with students, and I never would’ve developed it on my own. It’s so much better than it would be if I tried to do it on my own. So there’s like an ownership issue that I think is tricky because students want it, but it requires a level of institutional support. So far, like four different times I’ve talked to people at other places, the students were excited, but the students were then going to leave. So there needs to be institutional buy-in and at least one person to be that buy-in person who is available every night and who wants to keep the program going and ensure that it stays a quality program. So [Pathways] is kind of unique because this is a place where being able to work with this program gives me a chance to flex my clinical psychology skill muscles that I don’t really get to do. But places that have like graduate programs, they’re supervising therapists in training. They’re not necessarily like itching to have the chance to like train and supervise undergraduate students.
I think another challenge is that there’s been a shift for students such that there’s a lot of pressure to graduate early, to get done as quickly as possible, to only do things that count in terms of general ed. This is absolutely outside of typical structure. We need people who aren’t focused on getting through as quickly as possible and more and more people are focused on that and for good reasons. You know, financial reasons, and economy reasons, and whatever. So we used to be bigger, and we used to turn trainees away every semester and now every semester it’s like, “Will we survive?” So that’s like a shift. I think the school has cracked down on like number of elective credits so it used to be that it was common for people to do community internships AND peer advocacy but now it seems like you can only do one. I don’t really understand that but that seems to be a thing. There’re more barriers now so I don’t know how much longer were going to be able to keep going but I’m hopeful. I’m optimistic. My vision, so I used to run the internship program, and everyone was like “I just shadow, I don’t have any skills.” And my vision was that everyone would get training but that didn’t end up working out. I think people who have the skills are able to bring so much more to the table and learn more because you have these foundational things already.
Thank you to Dr. Katz for letting me interview her during the hectic first week of classes. If you have any questions, you can reach her at katz@geneseo.edu and me at serena.drobnack@gmail.com.
