Before Pui Ling Tam became director of San Francisco Peer Resources, she grew up just another young person in a summer program. There Pui taught other youth her age and younger. After college, she continued to teach young people and ran a youth empowerment program in Chinatown that partnered with other youth programs, including Peer Resources.
“That’s when I saw the cross-over work being done,” says Pui, “and the need to coordinate.” Learning from these experiences, Pui and the San Francisco Youth Empowerment Fund are convening a group called San Francisco Leadership Allies, “not to add more work,” says Pui, “but to build on the work all these CBOs do in terms of youth empowerment.”
The CBOs in the San Francisco Leadership Allies groups includes TAYSF, Peer Resources, the San Francisco Youth Commission, the Student Advisory Council at SFUSD, YMAC, Wellness Initiative, Beacon, and others. The goal of the San Francisco Youth Leadership Allies is to better serve the city’s youth by building a youth-service community that’s more coordinated.
The idea for a Youth Leadership Allies group came to Pui after she would meet with other youth leadership groups like the Youth Commission or the SAC (Student Advisory Committee to SFUSD) to have interesting conversations, but not really have a goal or go anywhere. “Since I saw that clearly we don’t do this work alone,” says Pui. “My interest was building a community, even if we didn’t have an ‘ask.’”
Outside of the San Francisco Youth Leadership Allies group, Pui is the director at Peer Resources, a youth development program embedded in public schools. The mission of Peer Resources is to create change in schools and communities through the leadership of young people engaging, training, and advocating for young people. Peer Resources works with middle school and high schools students. This year, they will work with 14 SFUSD schools.
In an academic elective in their schools, Peer Resources trains students to be Peer Leaders. “We teach critical core skills like active communication, active listening, and problem-solving,” says Pui, “in order for young participants to be able to say what transformative change that we want and can make. The young people determine the themes they want to work on, and do it. “They say, ‘actually, the need is THIS, not that,’” says Pui.
Peer Resources trains around 600 Peer Leaders who then determine what they want to make change around in their schools and community. For example, at O’Connell for several years, students observed teachers in order to give feedback about cultural competence in the classroom. Another includes 6th graders working to decrease the isolation of their peers, through building community and lunch activities. Peer groups mostly take place during the school days.
“We are also known for restorative mediation that we’ve adapted,” says Pui. Restorative mediation is when young people, for example, young people who have fights and are referred to our peer-trained mediators, run mediation in order to talk about what happened and what to do about to fix the issue. “At heart, restorative mediation is really supporting young people to directly communicate feelings through peers,” says Pui. At one high school, the peer mediation reduced the suspension rate by 57%.
Other main services at Peer Resources include peer tutoring, peer mentoring, peer support groups and peer education. Peer Resources re-established an alumni intern program, where they have six alumni, somewhat recent grads of SFUSD, working ten hours per week with students.
Also, within its program structure Peer Resources has a Youth Council with representatives from each high school who meet each week. This group sees the program beyond each school and can build a larger community, and “asks how Peer Resources can move forward and advises me on it,” says Pui. Pui and her staff are also building up to have young people on their Advisory Committee made of community partners, school partners (like Principals), and Peer Resources alumni and former staff, which will be critical to have young people’s voice in the program.
Pui says she is also are proud of how alumni come back to work for Peer Resoures. Five of our 14 coordinators are alumni of the program. Pui knows Peer Resources has had an impact on people who still feel passionately about it, like Supervisor Breed, who is an alumnus.
“Being a 30 year-old community,” says Pui about Peer Resource’s accomplishments, and “the fact that we know our alumni are in the city still doing youth development and education work, that’s a major accomplishment.”
Pui wrapped up our conversation on the importance of youth and young adult engagement in youth services. We can’t be a youth program without youth voice. This is not as simple as asking our young people ‘what do you want?’ But also, we can’t keep replicating an adult-generated system, even with best intentions. To change that system for the better, it is important to have sustained youth voice in the system.