The Student Wellbeing and Inclusivity Service (SWIS) have received funding to train ten colleagues across the team to become accredited ‘Look After Your Mate’ trainers. Student Minds have a ‘Train the Trainer’ programme to enable University staff to deliver the Look After Your Mate workshop in-house, and it’s really exciting that SWIS will be able to deliver these workshops across the academic year.
The Look After Your Mate workshop was developed by Student Minds, and aims to equip students with the confidence, tools, and skills to support a friend or peer who may be struggling with mental health difficulties, whilst also looking after their wellbeing. Each workshop covers:
The Look After Your Mate workshop will be delivered to the full team of 73 Residence Life Residents' Assistants and Senior Residents' Assistants, as part of their training programme. Then, over the academic year, our ten trainers in SWIS will aim to deliver workshops to Essex students, and will work closely with the Students' Union and departments to identify key groups or student leaders that would benefit from attending the workshop.
We’ll be publishing workshop dates and information on our Events pages, that will give students details on signing up to available workshops, which are limited to ten students per session.
We feel really hopeful that these kinds of proactive interventions in supporting student mental health will have a positive impact on tackling mental health at the University. Peer-to-peer support is invaluable, and it will be great to boost the confidence and skillsets of students to have conversations on mental health.