By Sarah Elbeshbishi
A new University of Maryland student mentoring program, Peer to Peer, has partnered with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to work with resettled refugee students around College Park, MD.
The IRC is an organization that focuses on helping and resettling people who have faced conflict, disaster or danger in their own countries. The students Peer to Peer is involved with are high school-aged refugee youths who have been resettled in the Prince George’s County area.
After being unable to volunteer at a similar organization in Canada and given the IRC’s lack of student-specific programs in Silver Spring, junior neurobiology and physiology major Shivani Shah founded Peer to Peer during the spring semester.
The IRC “already had the after-school program in place, but they didn’t have the manpower to deal with the amount of students they have,” Shah said. Due to its partnership with the IRC, Peer to Peer was able to provide the mentors needed for the after-school program.
“A lot of refugees actually are resettled in the [Prince Georges] county area because there is an IRC,” Regina Wingate, Peer to Peer treasurer and junior mechanical engineering major, said.
Because there is such a large population of resettled refugees near College Park, Shah and Wingate also “thought it was a need that was very relevant in our area and that it’s just such a nationwide issue that the University of Maryland would be a great base to kind of start a national move of acceptance,” Wingate said.
This fall semester is the first time that the mentors are actually attending the tutoring sessions even though the program was technically formed last semester.
Wingate said they were focused on getting the organization approved by the university as well as creating the constitution before the organization began any tutoring.
Currently, Peer to Peer members travel to a local high school three-to-four times a week to tutor the refugee students in English, math and various other subjects.
While the primary focus is on tutoring students, the program is so much more than just a tutoring program.
“One of our major goals is just to help [the students] assimilate to American culture because it is so drastically different,” Wingate said.
Due to the novelty of this organization, Peer to Peer has depended on listserv, word of mouth, and the First Look Fair to expand the club and gain new participants. By doing so they have been able to bring in members such as junior physics major Anna Grafov.
Grafov saw Peer to Peer on a listserv. She applied because of the similarity to a program she volunteered for in high school, but working with high school students is “very different than anything I’ve done before,” Grafov said.
Even though mentoring high school students is new to her, it is somewhat of a familiar experience to her “in that you’re still trying to connect with someone trying to help them figure out their way,” Grafov added.
The organization also aligns with the university’s Year of Immigration, which aims to foster and transform an inclusive environment on issues relating to immigration and refugees. “This issue has always been important to me,” Shah said. “But it’s kind of come to light on the national stage and global stage…so I feel like [UMD is] definitely trying too highlight this issue.”
Peer to Peer is “an important organization to be part of because it’s bigger than yourself,” Wingate said. “You learn a lot about yourself in the process and it’s just kind of inspiring to be a part of because these…refugee students have gone through so much and yet they are still so positive.”
Peer to Peer is looking to expand and add more students who want to be a part of this program and contribute to the organization. Students interested in joining just need to fill out an application for Peer to Peer.
“You help [the refugee students] and you teach them and they learn from you, but I think we stand to learn a lot ourselves too,” Grafov said.