Miriam:

Okay, can you talk a bit about motivation? What motivates facilitators to give up that kind of time and what motivates the youth that are taking part in the peer education to take the programs?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, this is what always astounds me and motivates me in turn is that I get so many emails from people wanting to volunteer with us, and I’d talked to so many people real like, “Can you sign me up for that?” Like they really want to do that. And people just love the idea of teaching good sex ed, like quality sex ed that has a bit of different spin to it than maybe what they got in high school because maybe they were queer themselves and they felt really left out by the sex ed they were being taught, or maybe they found that sex education was problematic in other ways, and so I find that a lot of people want to kind of give back to people who are bit younger than them and kind of impart what they learned and just find it really exciting, the prospect of being in front of a classroom and doing that, so we have a ton of people who just really want to be animators and really want to get up in front of those youth and teach these workshops.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough spaces for everyone to do it, who wants to. We are quite selective about who we take on as animators. It’s very dependent on people’s experience and personality etc., but there are other ways of getting involved too, and they’re equally important, they’re just more behind the scenes program development or just helping things to run smoothly, be it photocopying and all the materials that we need to hand out, and folding pamphlet, stuffs that sound mundane, but it’s so important because that’s how we get this information to the students, or finding free or cheap food to bring to animator training or something because people need to eat.

So there are lot of different roles that people can take on, but I've found out that there’s been no shortage interests in getting involved with us, and that’s been really exciting, so that’s on the volunteer level.

In terms of getting high school youth involved in the peer education component, that was much more challenging, so we went through quite a ruthless recruitment campaign this past winter in December and in January, where we were going back to all the high schools we’ve worked with and starting with the grades that we’ve worked with, going back to all those classrooms and saying like, “Do you remember us? We came to these workshops with you in the fall. We wanted to tell you about this exciting opportunity.”

We found it really difficult to get people to sign up. It was really difficult. I think that was for several reasons. First of all, high school students tend to be quite busy, the high school students that we’ve worked with in the private schools. Often in the winter times, on their weekends. They were doing ski club, or something, or maybe their family had a country home that they went to a lot, or there’s traveling involved.

Also, there tend to be a lot of commitments and clubs to be involved with, and just a lot of home works etc. So we found that in general, people are really kind of busy, and kind of daunted by the prospect to doing a thirty-hour training and coming here for five Saturdays. And then, what we found with the public schools, is often, people had jobs, so it was hard to fit it into their schedules, whatever it was, it was really challenging to get people involved at that level,and we ended up with our group of eight students who we were so happy with and were fantastic, and they were people who did have the time and did have the personal motivation to do it, and were really excited by it.

And I am happy to say that we’ve seen some of them like really blossom throughout the process of this, and really kind of come into themselves and learn a lot, and we had a lot of people tell us at the end of it like this changed my life, it was such a wonderful experience, thank you so much, like so much gratitude in general. So we know that we did a great job with them, and that they were happy with it, but actually finding people in the first place was really difficult.