Peer Support and Mentoring
Key Lessons
Peer support and mentoring has unique role to play
- Knowing your mentor has “been there” and has a deep understanding of your experience speeds up the transformation process – this gives credibility to the promise of moving forward, sheds deeper insight and provides an example of what’s possible.
- Seeing what others can achieve demonstrates their unique potential beyond their problem. This also helps clients uncover their own potential, talents and interests and build on those.
- Having someone who really understands helps people develop trust and openness – which leads to self-awareness and readiness to transform and follow their own healthy potential.
- Peer support and mentoring recognises the distinct human being inside and connects at a more personal level – on all sides – socially and more professionally.
You can use peer support and mentoring all along the client journey
Peer support and mentoring can be used in different ways to support people as they progress towards and into work.
- Engaging prospective clients – People who have made significant progress themselves by using a service can encourage others to take part by explaining, “If I could do it, so can you”
- Developing supportive friendships and social links – For isolated people this is a critical part of feeling healthy, happy and confident, and peers are better suited for this than staff advisers who have other commitments.
- Showing the way forward – Mentors can act as role models and help people develop both within groups on one-to-one
- Providing development opportunities for clients – Once clients have come to the end of a training programme, they may look for additional activity and a way to help others. Mentoring others can give them a progression route towards work.
- Mentoring, as needed, while job hunting and once in the workplace – Having a mentor to keep in touch with and go to for support can make the difference between sustaining work and giving up.
Peer support and mentoring can play a role in community development
The more people develop a sense of supporting others – either as peers in a group together or as a mentor skillfully helping others – the more their confidence grows and they tend to want to get more involved and help more people. To further boost their connections to the wider community and employability skills, community projects are often a logical next step. Groups of mentors or clients can also get involved as part of their plan of development activity. Developing mentors can be a valuable resource for collaborating with your partners.
Our example projects do this in three ways:
- Building community involvement into the development programme;
- Creating new groups for clients to take part in and supporting them to start their own groups; and
- Using groups within the project as a stepping stone to wider community activities.
Train and support your peer mentors
Peers within a group can often make their own ground rules about how to show respect for each other. Mentors have a more responsible role, so they need training and ongoing support. Useful training includes:
- Boundaries, confidentiality, listening and clear roles – supporting others to make their own best choices
- Understanding issues they might encounter – suicide prevention, health issues
- Assessing clients’ needs and progress – using different tools for evaluation
Formal and informal support structures are also important to ensure mentors do not take on clients’ problems and they are equipped to give the right support. Supervision sessions, team meetings, chats at the end of the day and complementary therapies can all help. Encouraging mentors’ own further development is also important.
It can be useful to have a database of case studies of how to address different situations that arise, and access to mentoring networks and a range of people to talk to about their experience.
Getting it right
- Flexibility is critical – allow different types of support to suit different needs
- Create an environment conducive to peer support where people can open up.
- Give your mentors a successful model to work to
- Make sure you have the right match between mentor and client – if it does not work, change it.
- Remember that mentors are on their own journey too and that they need plenty of support and development opportunities to fit their interests and strengths.
Fitting it into your own plans
Peer support and mentoring can fit into any stage of your work with clients where they seem to be stuck, seeking social support from staff as much as advice, or when they simply do not believe there is potential for them to move beyond their current circumstances. While peer support and especially mentoring take time and training, it can ultimately increase the progression rate for clients, improve the sustainability of their progress and meet clients’ needs in a way that ordinary staff’s roles do not allow for.
By helping people genuinely move on, it will reduce the demands on all the support service staff working with them, make their jobs more satisfying and free them to support more clients. Where you can employ people with similar backgrounds to your clients, your service’s credibility will also improve.
All in all, peer support and mentoring is excellent value for money.
Keep in mind, however, that it is only one part of the puzzle. Be imaginative and consider how mentors can also get involved in activities that address other barriers to work, such as awareness-raising among employers.