Soft, yellow light blankets the walls of the AMS Peer Support Hub in the Nest. Every nook and cranny of the room is adorned with macrame mirrors, potted plants, meditative posters and motivational notes. As a kettle breathes out clouds of steam into the air, four students sit across from each other at a table strewn with puzzle pieces and board game chips. These are just a few of Peer Support’s volunteers, who work to help UBC students dealing with academic stress, substance use and other issues impacting mental well-being.
AMS Peer Support began serving students in the fall of 2020 as a merger between Speakeasy — an initiative started in 1970 focused on supporting UBC students — and Vice, which provided confidential services centred on addiction and substance use. The collaboration intends to fill the gaps left by other counselling services, blending support and education outreach for a multifaceted program that addresses an array of student concerns.
During the 2024-25 academic year, 38 student volunteers collectively poured 3,600 hours into running the service. Unlike typical counselling sessions, people who attend Peer Support get the chance to chat with a fellow student. Though volunteers may not be able to provide professional guidance, they have an intimate understanding of the student experience and are more than willing to lend a listening ear if someone needs to get things off their chest.
“We’re not here to pull you out of an issue, we’re here to sit with you in that emotion, and collaboratively explore the situation and empower you to feel capable of navigating the stressors in your life,” wrote Marissa Miller, a team lead. She handles the educational aspects of Peer Support, which mainly consists of managing a team of volunteers, running workshops and distributing supplies for safer substance use.
Miller is currently working towards a degree in psychology, which began when her love for theatre collided with mental health awareness efforts. At 14, Miller landed a role in the short film “Lifelines,” directed by Catharine Parke, who, through cinema, sought to raise awareness about anxiety and non-suicidal self-injury among young girls. As the protagonist, Miller’s role required extensive preparation and research to properly portray the character's struggles — the experience helped her discover a lot about who she was when the cameras stopped rolling, too. Right up until the time came to apply for university, Miller maintained her interest in mental health, “learning how to live with my own struggles [and] how to support the people around me who were struggling, too.”
As Miller’s story demonstrates, the path toward working in fields related to mental health doesn’t always start with an explicit interest in doing so. This also happens to be the case for Peer Support Coordinator Alex Girardi, who oversees all volunteers.
Girardi worked in marketing in Ireland before changing tracks post-pandemic in pursuit of something that answered the question that had been nagging at him, career-wise: “Is it worthwhile?” A keen listener with a curiosity for “how people work,” his friends recommended he look into practicing counselling. He packed up his things and moved to Vancouver from Nelson, B.C., where he had been living for a few years, to pursue a psychology degree at UBC.
He eventually found his way to Peer Support as a volunteer in 2023, then worked as the assistant coordinator for a year before getting promoted to his current role in 2025. He credits his work at Peer Support as the source of fulfillment that solidified his decision to switch careers, and he feels a sense of pride in giving “volunteers a platform to do what they clearly want to do.”
Although Peer Support doesn’t set strict application requirements, all volunteers and staff undergo three days of intensive training, 10 hours of practice sessions and a two-day Applied Suicide Intervention Skills training at the BC Crisis Centre. The main criterion the centre evaluates, according to Girardi, is an applicant’s sense of empathy and a willingness to give back to the community.
Like Girardi, team lead Julia Martin wasn’t always set on studying psychology — she bounced from Western University to Capilano University to UBC, redirecting her focus from biology to psychology. Through all of it, she was guided by a desire to “learn more about why we do the things we do.” She’s drawn to the endless possibilities of the social sciences, where ‘what if’ questions dominate the conversation and will rarely have one right answer, because people are “changing and evolving all the time.”
As a team lead, Martin runs bi-weekly practice sessions in a role-playing exercise that imitates Peer Support meetings. Although these meetings are fictitious, some of the scenarios discussed are gathered from places like Reddit, where students air out some of their day-to-day struggles, many of them revolving around feelings of loneliness. “I think that we often spend a lot of time in dysfunctional patterns, thinking that they are the only way forward and that we're alone in hard times,” Martin wrote. “I think having someone to listen can make a really positive impact on people's lives.”
As the assistant coordinator of education and outreach, psychology student Amy Daiminger is less involved in these one-on-one sessions. She manages harm reduction workshops, like sessions on safer drinking and group naloxone training on how and when to use the opioid overdose reversal drug, which served 235 attendees in the 2024-25 academic year.
In any undergraduate degree, assignments can demand long hours spent in busy coffee shops or cramped libraries, only for students to feel unfulfilled after completing them. For Daiminger, working at Peer Support has a more tangible positive impact than her schoolwork: “I’m doing this for a reason, instead of just doing [something] to hand it in.”
When Daiminger started as a volunteer, she would often fixate on making support sessions flawless, fluffing and rearranging pillows in an effort to perfect what she felt she could control. She soon learned, however, “that a good support session doesn’t require perfection and solutions, just genuine care for the person and being with them in whatever they are going through.” Miller initially found herself in the same boat, eventually finding comfort in reframing her anxieties using a sentiment her parents had instilled in her: “nerves mean that you care.”
After all, the appeal of these services isn’t necessarily perfection — it’s relatability. “We’re peers, so we’ve been there,” Miller said. Sometimes people can feel less inclined to speak to mental health professionals who come from a very different background or stage in life, so the peer support model aims to alleviate stigmas by showing people that their peers might be going through the same experiences.
Miller said that at the very first session she ran, the two of them sat in silence for a while as the person cried. While they started closed-off, by the end of the session, “their entire demeanour had changed: they were smiling and even making jokes.” AMS Peer Support volunteers aren’t expecting everyone to approach conversations about mental health the same way; regardless of whether someone wants to chat, cry or simply embrace silence — they are there to listen.
