GREG BARNETT
Sports Assistant
The Pepperdine Counseling Center and Alcohol Education coordinator Robert Scholz have created a new outreach program that utilizes students rather than professional counselors. Peers Educating Peers (PEP) for Healthy Choices is comprised of four students selected to design and collaborate with other students or organizations to raise awareness about alcohol, drugs, sexual violence, mental health and nutrition.
The educators were selected after an extensive interview process and are enduring an intense training program to prepare for the coming year. The four students were selected last spring and are senior Kapualani Kauhane, juniors Alan Reynolds and Karra Imoto and sophomore Kylee Chacon.
“These guys are awesome, the people that were selected are taking on some really big issues,” Scholz said.
The four educators each have their own area of expertise to design programs and outreach efforts to gain awareness for their specific subject. Chacon is taking on drug and alcohol abuse; Kauhane, mental health; Reynolds, sexual abuse; and Imoto, nutritional health.
“Friends promoting wellness, healing, and social justice” is the mission statement for PEP, which the four educators created together.
The four educators had an informational table at the Waves Cafe on Tuesday where they handed out their first monthly newsletter. Students also talked to the educators and signed up to receive more information.
Junior PJ Bourke, who was a peer educator at his high school, said he supports the new program and would like to be peer educator at Pepperdine.
“I think it’s a great idea because students need peers to reach out, too,” Bourke said.”It’s taken too long to get program like this going here.”
The idea of PEP is not to provide counseling or therapy for students, but educating and raising awareness, on campus, about these issues.
Another aspect of the program is that students will be able to reach out to the peer educators. Scholz said, at first, the program will mainly be the educators going out and letting the campus know of their presence, but in the future students can reach out and talk to them at will, if needed.
“One thing that was important to me is that I can connect to the students personally,” Chacon said. “I want to connect to my peers, and if somebody needs a mentor or someone to talk to about anything they should be able to reach out to us if they aren’t comfortable to talk to anyone else.”
Programs similar to PEP exist at more than 1,000 college campuses in the United States covering everything about college life. Pepperdine’s program will only focus on the initial topics until the program gains some ground and experience on campus.
As for the group’s future goals, the team wants to make Pepperdine’s campus different from others around the country.
“We want Pepperdine to ‘get it,’” Scholz said. “These things are happening around us and we want our student body to be different.”
10-04-2007
