By Sarah Elbeshbishi

With finals just around the corner, self-care has been a hot topic issue, but for some groups on campus it’s something they focus on year round. 

Every Thursday the University Health Center sets up tables at different places on campus where students can have discussions about wellness and get information about resources they can access, which is known as Thriving Thursdays. 

“We wanted to have a greater presence on campus on a more consistent basis,” Shayna Shor, a sexual health program assistant at the health center, said. 

As well has having a greater presence, they also wanted to have a platform where they could talk about wellness without spewing out facts or figures relating to it.    

“We’re trying to get to different locations on campus, so again, we can be having these conversations about wellness with diverse groups of students who maybe aren’t as close to the health center,” Shor added. 

Another big part of Thriving Thursdays is receiving feedback from the students. 

“I think a big goal that we have shifted towards this year is really getting that feedback,” Olivia Mays, the mental health and stress management coordinator, said. 

This is the second year off Thriving Thursdays and during the first year, the health center was “focused a lot more on delivering the content rather than getting that feedback,” Mays said. “And this year, I think we’ve taken a different approach because we want to know where the students are. Our sole purpose is to be here for the students.”

For their second year, they implemented monthly prompts to not only encourage students to participate but to also get feedback from them to determine how to best help them. 

“The overall goal, I think of that prompt is not only to get the feedback, but also to start a conversation so that we can then connect them to the appropriate source,” Shor said. “Our peers are trained on how to appropriately respond…” 

Thriving Thursdays are ran by another health center program called Peer Educators, which are undergraduate students to help educate the campus community on various health topics.

“Peer education is the best way, I think, to address this particular population,” Mays said. “And our education program is worded in evidence based research so we fully believe that all the programming that we do has to be backed by some research and what’s the best practice for health promotion,”   

Peer Educators is a program that dates back to the early 1990s, according to Mays, and is divided up between three areas — sexual health, mental health and substance abuse. 

Despite having different areas and coordinators for each area, the program works closely together as a whole. 

“We work very, very closely,” Shor said. “We try to do as much intersectional work as possible so that we can really emphasize the fact that wellness is not one dimensional t is multi-dimensional and there are a lot of aspects to it.” 

Both Shor and Mays were Peer Educators themselves. During her sophomore year, Shor was an alcohol and other drug use peer educator and then became a Peer Leader the following year.

Mays was a sexual health peer educator in 2017, when she was a student at the University of Maryland, and came back after graduation as the sexual health program assistant.

“This past year, we were very, very intentional about [cross training Peer Educators] so that we can do a lot more programs like Thriving Thursdays, where they feel confident even answering questions about the content that they weren’t necessarily heavily trained on,” Mays said.