Why the Social Emotional Leadership Foundation (SELF)
Children who face isolation are at greater risk of being victimized by peers, making a focus on improving social support a useful anti-bullying approach (1). Everyone in the school community feels safer when children who have been isolated become included.
We know from the Middle Years Index that our schools are facing an incredible challenge: over one in four children in British Columbia schools are not thriving (2). We have been offering school-based programs in the Lower Mainland (including through the Vancouver School Board) for the past seven years to address this very real challenge.
Our programs revealed that persistent dynamics shift much more quickly when older peers mentor younger students in developing healthy relationship skills. In fact, research has shown that younger children look up to older children and will happily follow their guidance on social questions more than adults. At the same time, we became aware that no organization exists with a mandate to help schools create consistent, exciting leadership development opportunities for peer leaders.
And so, we offer schools additional behind-the-scenes support to help make this happen.
Peer leadership programs are often undertaken by teachers and staff on a volunteer basis, frequently adding to an already heavy professional workload. SELF recognized the opportunity to create a model for the development of social-emotional learning and leadership skills that supports teachers and staff who want to foster this in their students but lack the capacity and resources to do so on their own.
Without proper training, older students run the risk of repeating the same problem dynamics that they’re trying to fix.
Our model recognizes the limited capacity most schools face. Despite some excellent social-emotional learning programs and very hard-working and creative school teams, most schools lack the resources and the capacity to impact and create the level of change needed to meet children’s social-emotional needs.
Our goal is to give older children an alternative to the ‘cool’ culture. Our Peer Leadership Program emphasizes the intrinsic joy that comes with helping younger children, and develops a sense of purpose and set of skills that eases them through their own transitions at school.
SELF’s approach makes the acquisition of social-emotional skills fun so that students want to be part of the process to make schools healthier, happier places of belonging. The new BC curriculum will require students to attain a higher level of personal and social competence. SELF provides expertise to help students meet these goals more quickly.