[Wendy]
So, thank you all so much for coming. We really, really appreciate the amazing turnout, that’s happened, we have. We are dragonfly mental health, we’re a non-profit organization And this is our very first workshop, and as hopefully you’re all aware. It is about organizing your own peer network We have five fabulous panellists and we’ll have them introduce themselves in just a minute.
Thank you all for coming here, I really, really appreciate it. And we hope that you find this helpful and useful. So, one thing that everyone seems to be doing a phenomenal job of is maintaining their microphones off during the, the bulk of the presentation. We would like to have you please keep them off until we ask for engagement, there’ll be one little point right near the beginning and then after that, we’ll have the panellists go through a brief presentation, general overview of how to build a peer network, and then we will be opening it up, primarily to questions and answers from you. You can also. You can also add your questions to the chat, and we’ll have someone observing that and keeping track of that and we can read your questions that way. If you don’t feel comfortable unmuting and asking the questions yourself. If you would like to ask questions yourself or speak, ah, please use a raise hand feature so that we can identify you, and we don’t kind of have chaos We would, so if you, if you’re not familiar, how to do that. Try to find the participants button at the bottom, usually it’s at the bottom of your screen if you’re using a browser. This will have a. This will pop up a separate window and at the bottom of that it should have a raise hand button, you can click that to raise your hand or click that to lower your hand, and we’ll be able to see it a hand will pop up next to your name.
We already covered the accessibility feature if anyone needs access to a live recording or a live transcript rather of this, this recording and, and workshop, we do have that available so that’s in the chat. I’ll add the link one more time for anyone who came late. And if you do need that. Go ahead and ping either Jelena, or Olga, please directly, and we’ll make sure that that gets to you. Um, let’s see I’ll add it to the chat again really quick before we get started. Okay. So, and people are already chatting with each other and helping each other out. That’s fantastic So, okay, we also wanted to point out in case you didn’t notice there was in the email with this link and zoom information a Starter Guide! so some of our members did a phenomenal job of putting together, both a, you know, kind of grid table form. And, as well as a screen-reader-friendly version of how to start, what to think about when you’re starting your own peer network and so this is a scratchpad for you to start putting your ideas down.
Hopefully this presentation and Q&A session today will also help you think about things that maybe haven’t come up or you might be intimidated by because it’s so much when you don’t know but we’ve got an amazing panel of experts to help you with that today So Fear not.
So, let’s get started with who. Who Dragonfly Mental Health is. Just to share a little bit of our backstory. We were just founded last year. And so, we were, we were born out of a mission that a lot of us from around the world shared that we wanted to create a sustainable systemic change in the way, mental health is perceived and addressed, specifically in academia. Dragonfly Mental Health is purely by academics for academics. We, we have over 90 volunteers right now, that are addressing all kinds of issues, and as a non-profit organization, Dragonfly Mental Health provides a variety of services and is engaged in a variety of activities. We do provide consulting services directly to communities and campuses, we conduct our own research, and we support academics at all levels in a wide variety of ways. So, check out our website! If you haven’t done that or in order to find different ways to engage with us.
So, today’s agenda we’ll briefly have the panel, the panellists introduce themselves. And then we’re going to cover a few key topics for starting your own mental health peer network. And so, the first question the most important one is why, why are you starting it really defining that’s important. The next is to find other like-minded individuals and allies, that can help you with this, both directly and indirectly. We will discuss building the backbone, designing the structure and establishing a schedule, as well as touch on, you know how to be seen, how to be heard, how to communicate what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and encourage other people outside of the organization structure to go ahead and, you know, get involved and take advantage of the things you’re building.
So first, my name is Wendy Marie Ingram. I have a PhD in molecular and cell biology, and I’m one of the co-founders of Dragonfly Mental Health. I am currently the executive director and previously, both my, my graduate school at UC Berkeley, I started a graduate network just within our department, and then as a postdoc, I helped and worked with graduate students and postdocs, and, you know, master’s students too, build a mental health grad network at Johns Hopkins. I’ll let Jelena introduce herself.
[Jelena]
Hello everybody, my name is Jelena Brasanac, and I’m currently finishing my PhD in medical neurosciences in Berlin. I’m the other co-founder of Dragonfly Mental Health, together with Wendy, that I had the pleasure to meet and start this whole story. Less than a year ago. I’m here, Director of Operations and yeah, before setting up Dragonfly Mental Health. My experience with peer network comes from Students Neuroscience Society during my bachelor studies, and through the Charite PhD net, now, during my PhD studies So the next panellist is Olga I’ll let her introduce herself.
[Olga]
Hi all, thank you so much for joining. My name is Olga, but I prefer Olya. And so, I have both MD and PhD. I work mainly with cancer, precancerous conditions in humans, and I’m doing my postdoc now, like, I started the fourth year of postdoc in Germany, in Dresden. And my social activities and my volunteering. I’ve been focusing on. For a while, I’ve been focusing on mental health. so organized a mental health initiative in our institute in Mustang. Then I also am currently organizing together was actually some participants here, the mental health collective of Max Planck society, the whole Max Planck Society in Germany. And I also work on non-mental health issues. So basically, I organize the Dresden Mass Spec Community here in Dresden. And our next panellist is Teresa.
[Teresa]
Hi everyone, I’m Teresa. I’m a third-year PhD student in plant microbiology. I’m also located in Germany in Jena, and my experiments of setting up a peer network comes, also from non-Mental Health Initiative, so I helped to create a student’s group of Amnesty International, back at University in Regensburg, and with starting my PhD I became more and more interested in the topic of mental health. So that’s why I’m here now. Thank you so much, and our final panellist is Roo.
[Roo]
Hi everyone, I’m Roo Steinberg. I recently defended my PhD in cellular and molecular medicine at Johns Hopkins. and both of my experiences in building peer networks have been from a mental health perspective. The first one was the pre-health peer mentoring program that I started during my bachelor studies at CUNY Brooklyn College in New York, and the second one was the Peer collective, which is a run, by the students, for the students, mental health initiative that we created at Johns Hopkins.
[Wendy]
Great. So, um, you know, let’s just launch into this and try to get as much time for Q&A as we can. So, as, as we were kind of hinting at the critical, the most critical point is really to get you started off on the right foot is to identify the reason why you’re creating a peer network and so just phrasing it a little bit differently, you know, what. How do you think a peer network should or will address the concerns, and create positive change? When finding your why, It really does help to consider every aspect of what your ideal peer network will look like. But and we’ll touch on a lot of things and hopefully gets you more comfortable and more familiar with it, but it’s an ongoing process and it’s not something that we’re hoping you’ll be overwhelmed by, but it is something that this will help you not have to reinvent the wheel. We’re creating a support network here, to encourage and allow for people all over the world to, you know, to activate and galvanize within their own communities, and create change it’s totally doable.
So, before we really launch into the presentation part, I wanted to just pause and see if anyone here would be willing to unmute and share why you came today. What, what are you interested in so far? What, what’s even your protocol idea about why you would want to start a peer network yourself. Does anybody want to share?
[Ashani]
Hi, my name is Ashani,. I’m a, I’m doing my PhD in law at the University of Toronto. and I just recently started tweeting about starting a mental health or not just a mental health but a peer support network for people who are doing law degrees because I found that a lot of times when people talk about requiring support, in the sciences or the social sciences, it doesn’t totally apply to people in law. We. Our programs are designed slightly differently. And therefore, because, and because of that. Some of the support stuff doesn’t apply to us. So, because of these peculiarities, I felt like we needed our own space to be able to talk about some of these things. Kind of like a safe space. So, I started this thing called Legal Academic Circle, which I. That’s the name that I decided on because I thought the analogy of a circle was lovely. But also because of my own experiences with mental health in academia. A couple of years ago I was diagnosed with some things so and I had to do a lot of running around from accessibility and accommodations and bureaucratic stuff, so I just, and I didn’t have a space to talk about it. So that was my ‘Why’.
[Wendy]
That’s fantastic! Thank you so much for sharing and you really touched on a lot of things that run throughout, what we’re going to be talking about too, is that you know there are some universal principles that can kind of help anyone who’s kind of interested in this, but, but what you said about you, your programming your, you know, law, in particular, has its own unique features and aspects to it and culture. And so, that absolutely plays into adapting anything that we’re kind of presenting here and other people have done to your case to your community. So, thank you so much for sharing that. I’m just in a, in a main or trying to stay on time. We will go ahead and launch into, starting with Roo, presenting a couple slides about the why.
[Roo]
Hi, everybody. So the first thing we want to address when starting a peer network is, why do you want to start it, and just like in all other aspects of academia, when you’re studying a topic, you look for the gap. Right? You look for what need is not being filled. So, for me and starting mental health peer networks. I wanted to create and maintain a healthier and more supportive environment. That was the gap that I found in my experience, and I wanted to minimize all of the negative impacts that staying in academia can have on your mental health, through peer support networks, through having events and peer mentors, as we all have experienced in all different types of academic environments. It’s a pressure cooker. Right. We’re at such a high level of education that it’s stressful and many people feel isolated, they don’t have that community support to help them. And so that was the gap that I wanted to fill and just like Ashani said, you can have different reasons why you’re building peer networks, sometimes it can be to prioritize or push students and postdocs agendas on mental health, or to create a more open and inclusive environment focusing on diversity and inclusion.
There are so many different ways you can have, and I encourage you to think about what your why is. So, for the mental health care networks that I started my main goal was to address the mental health and wellness needs of myself and my peers. To establish a more open and supportive community. And really, no one was talking about mental health admins weren’t listening to students, when we talked about our struggles. when we tried to convince them to fund these kinds of programs. and this was a problem, and I was like ‘if I don’t fix it, who’s going to?’ so you can always really be the person who instigates change and you know fills that need for your community. The main themes we focused on were peer support and advice and mentorship and allyship tool building workshops. we gave workshops on maintaining motivation, managing your stress, anti-procrastination techniques, how to balance your mentor-mentee relationship with your PI. So many different topics.
We also held interactive community events that were more social. We had mental health awareness days and really to increase the support of the community for these initiatives. And we also wanted to improve faculty and Mental Health Training. That’s such an important aspect of mental health, that the faculty, and the administration know what to do when a student is in crisis, or how to work and interact with students so that they don’t reach a crisis point. Targeted groups of these kinds of peer networks can be students, can be postdocs, it can be individual departments or an entire institution, and the need of the community, in this case for mental health, is that there’s a neglectful and dangerous gap in programming to address our mental health needs. And unfortunately, that can lead to suicide and sometimes that can be the instigating factor for someone to say something needs to change. I’m going to be the change I want to see in the world, I’m going to create my own peer network. And as we all know, there’s so much published literature about mental health in grad school, how, you know, rates of suicide are higher because of the stress we’re under, and really who can benefit from these kinds of peer networks, its students and postdocs, but also faculty, advisors, programs as a whole, and even the scientific process, and an institution as a whole, because when the student body is happy their mental health is being taken care of their science or whatever area of academia, they’re working in will improve as a result. And so, you can make your peer network, either exclusive or inclusive of whatever groups you want or are able to include.
So for us, due to scope and funding and bandwidth issues we had our mental health care collective exclusively for grad students because we didn’t have the funding to support all of the postdocs, and create you know the wider systemic change that we’d like. Although, one thing you can do is apply for grants, ask for sponsorships. Those are things you can definitely do and will be addressed a little bit later on. But if you have the ability to, you have the funding. you can be as inclusive as you like. As many groups.
[Wendy]
Thank you so much Roo. And so, I’m Wendy Ingram and I’m going to touch on the next couple of topics: peer support, institutional support, basically finding your allies. So, you know, at No. No one should be doing this alone. I feel very, very strongly about that. And you know the best way to really get going and get started is to talk to friends talk to lab mates, talk to people within academia to find support, find ideas, to find other people, co-conspirators really, to get to help you do this and set things up You can also advertise so if you have just a small group of people like one or two they’re really gung-ho about it, but you want to recruit others. Don’t be shy send out an invitation to your grad program or to the school that you’re in to find other folks that are interested in this and want to work on it.
We got we recruited a ton of members at Johns Hopkins because we sent out a blanket couple of emails letting them know about our new organization and letting people know we wanted representation from all the departments within the School of Public Health Also, you can recruit by asking each department, you can kind of do like personal network approach too. So, you know, at Berkeley we ended up, we had five divisions within our department, it was a pretty big department but we wanted representation from each of the five divisions and so we actually went to each division found people we knew in that division and asked them who are the people you think would actually care about this? Who are already passionate and interested and compassionate and recruit them? Ask them directly. you know be really, not aggressive, but enthusiastic about, about asking people to join. And you can also poll the student body both as a way to raise awareness about what you’re doing and what you’re getting excited about, as well as figuring out what, what to focus on. What does everybody else want and need? Another important thing is institutional support. So, you know I’ve, I’ve really, as a grad student, we shied away from doing much other than talking to our admin support and base and a couple of faculty, to basically be like, will you guys pay for like coffee and cookies during our events, and then essentially leave us be. That was about it.
But when we were at Hopkins, we really wanted to do quite a lot more that wasn’t quite as private. We wanted to, for example, you know, like Roo mentioned, train faculty, and how to speak to students, how to recognize, and be more confident about broaching these subjects in an appropriate way. And so, we, you know, we talked to the heads of departments, we talked to the heads of university services, student assistance programs, psychological services. We had people from psych services come to all of our events in case people were, were triggered or had, you know, a reaction, and wanted to speak to a counsellor right away. You know, interacting with the, the university and with all these, these people, and partners, can be really, really beneficial and. We also worked with the dean. We went we got meetings with the Dean of the School of Public Health, and when we went there it was amazing because she was completely unaware of what we were doing, until we got in front of her, and gave her a bunch of material indicating what we were doing, what we wanted from her, and she supported us, it was fantastic. So, you know, it depends on your comfort level it depends on who’s there, but I encourage you to at least chat with most people.
So, one of the effective strategies with the Dean was to make these really attractive succinct descriptions and pretty, You know, leave-behinds is what they’re called. So we had a description of who we were, what we’ve accomplished so far and made it, like you know, with pictures and it was very nicely organized, it wasn’t just text on a page, and she hung on to it. She had it the next time we met with her. We had faculty that we knew kind of say, Oh, I had a meeting with the dean and she had that on her, her desk so it’s not, you know, things that people are less likely to just toss away or something is a strategy to work with so. Um, Let’s see. So sometimes you’ll be supported only after advocating vocally and numerous times. So, one of the things that I like to say is, be pleasantly persistent. If someone says no, the first time it doesn’t mean they’re going to say no, the second or third or fourth time you ask, and if they say that they need, You know if they say they’re not sure about what you’re doing or what you’re asking for, ask them directly what would convince you, what would you support and why, and then go, go ahead and see if that’s something that you can do and create.
So, um, you know there’s, there’s a lot of different places and organizations that are probably already on your campuses, so you can coordinate with them. Coordinating with student and postdoc organizations is also a good way to recruit, you can, here’s my pleasant persistence. Recommendation so you, you truly never know who’s gonna end up a really strong ally even if they’re sometimes the most sceptical people are your most vocal allies once you’ve convinced them. And so, if someone says no, go ahead and move on. Try not to take it personally and decide whether or not you want to re-engage and when. So, you can definitely ask when you’re talking to maybe existing postdoc reps or PhD reps or coordinators will, are they willing to promote your programming. Are they willing to encourage their students to utilize it? Well, the things that you’re doing and the programs you’re creating. Will they refer students in need to your organization, before they’re having a crisis, and will they coordinate with you about events so that you don’t have scheduling conflicts and, and so those are really good things to look at and work on. So next up is Jelena, who’s going to talk about building the structure.
[Jelena]
Okay, now we are getting to the hardcore stuff. We’re just trying to get to work. Okay, building the backbone and designing the structure. From my experience, this is the part where networks, either make or break it. As I could see So, pay special attention when structuring your team and, you know, deciding, who’s going to work with you. How is this interaction in the flow and, you know, what will your best way to function be? I’m going to cover these three, three topics: leadership, division of labour, and events. When it comes to leadership. Yeah, we collected some of our experiences from the team, and you can see that, you know, it’s pretty much diverse. So, there are different leadership styles and you can see with your team, what works the best for you. For example, one leader as a driving force it’s, you know, pretty conventional way. And I can say it’s the most difficult way because you know one person has to put everything on their own back and we all know how things are difficult and the thing is that, you know, motivation, or your time and you know resource effort, can you know, dry out so I would always suggest, don’t do this alone. Find a good team. It will be rewarding in many ways, in terms of quality of work, friendship, community interaction. I can you know just keep on going. So, from, from our different experiences we can either representative from different divisions and volunteers that, you know, co-presidents, or co-leaders. I think that’s my preferred style.
Then you know you can have a committee assembled from, you know, chairs and, you know, additional roles. When it comes to the division of labour. It is really good to have certain responsibilities, clearly communicated, and you know, taken over by people so if you’re organizing an event. Eventually, is responsible for organizing volunteers I don’t know completing specific tasks and so on, depending on how big your network is, you can have a Content Manager, Community Manager person who takes care of, you know, writing blog posts, certain materials, grants, newsletters. It’s really great if you all try to work this out but you know you have certain people who are responsible that things are going smoothly. When it comes to events. It also depends on your network and your team. And how many events and how frequently you host. I would also suggest that you plan, something like half a year in advance and then you know, reiterate, if this is working or not. And then you can have, you know, events hosted monthly or bi-monthly. And they can take different forms from workshops discussions, you know, social events, and something, you know, in that lane. Topics can really range from managing stress or mindfulness mentor-mentee relationships, you can you know host movie screening, a really fruitful discussion afterwards. And, yeah, it’s basically up to your imagination, what, what could be, could be done.
Okay! Olga?
[Olga]
Yeah, so I’m only and I’m going to talk to you about the meetings, basically. We’ll talk about regularity, place, and host in charge, and I think these are all things depend pretty much on how large your network is. So, the very beginning when you create the network. Most likely, it will be small. And while you’re still looking for allies, you’ll have meetings when needed. So, for example, you recruited two or three people, and then you have a meeting with them. An alternative to this is when you have a larger group you can have meetings, for example, every other day every other Monday morning at 9am. I don’t know who put a 9am here because I think 9am is just inhuman. Please can. We’ll edit it out and put a patch on 11am or like lunch meeting, or something. Or we can have a monthly, it also is sort of depending whether you’re preparing a certain event.
For example, there’s soon is going to be mental health awareness, week in October and we’re organizing it in the Institute, so, of course, we’ll have more regular meetings, prior to the events to organize that, but other than that we will only have meetings when needed. Yeah. And the best way is of course to make a doodle because you really want to for all the people who are in the in the network to participate, so don’t try, in my experience at least sometimes, of course, executive decision is needed, but it’s better to figure out the time when it’s good for everyone. And regarding the place where the meetings are it’s also really different. It also depends on how many people are there and it also depends on the infrastructure of your institute. For example, next hospital we have a nice like cosy cafe. And when the meetings that are small and more like personal, I tend to have them and to host them in this cafe, because it’s just nicer environment. However, you can also have the meeting inside the university cafeteria or ask the university to book a room for you when it’s needed, and you can have a regular central location, and now since like COVID happened. Base meetings are most of the meetings are in zoom but try to keep them regular. otherwise, people will fall apart. Now, free of charge zoom is 40 minutes. Either your university can like help you out with the zoom if you get proper institutional support, or just limit your meetings to 40 minutes it’s also not a bad time to limit yourself to. And regarding the meeting. Don’t be shy to send reminders, this is also very important. And this is like if you have a meeting established in one week.
My regular, is to send the reminder one week in advance, like, six and a half days precisely. And then, the day before. And some people are very bad at reading the email so just don’t be shy to knock in the door, or to send a personal email this is also no, not a problem. And regarding the host in charge, of course, this also will depend on how many people you have, but you don’t want as a leader of the working group or as the leader of the peer network you don’t want to host the meetings all the time by yourself, you need to spread the load. So you can choose either like voluntarily or by chance or however or whatever you choose the person who will be in charge that could be co-presidents can share the leadership, or it can be a flat organization strategy so no one is in charge but this is also like if you have 15 people sitting there someone is better to be in charge you know if it’s three people, of course, you don’t really need someone in charge, and agenda, we recommend to share the agenda prior to the meeting, if it’s possible, so people would manage to read it a bit through you know like we send you out this table. So, you before the meeting could have a chance to read through the table and see approximately what your thoughts are. You could have a committee chair. But it should be somewhat an open forum. And so, some people choose the updates in each meeting. So first, then updates, and then action steps, for the next week but for this you have to have regular meetings, of course, or like preparation for event.
For example, if we want to have a follow up meeting with all of you half a year later, that makes sense but it wouldn’t make much sense for all of us to have a meeting one week later, just because the steps which you are to take forward are too huge to make a meeting in one week so please keep in mind that it should be feasible. And then of course, it’s important to send follow up emails with the minutes, even if they’re just five sentences, please do that so people could keep a track so you yourself could also keep track. And the next thing. Teresa should be.
[Teresa]
Yes. Okay, so once you’re all set up and have your existing network and also your backbone and everything. You, of course, have to think about how you can spread the word, because at some point, you want to gain new members, and at the same time, you have to find an effective way on how to communicate within the group. So, let’s first come to new members – event publicity and call for new members. So, it’s of course, what you can always use is emails of your institute. There are different ways, send it out to all postdocs or PhD students whatever. Social media accounts. If you have good allies of course the university will also spread the word for you and We’ll, we’ll share things for you, but also make your own accounts and try to be as visible as possible. You can have a monthly newsletter, with updates – what you’ve been up to, what you’ve been doing. And again, ask your university or whatever to help you to spread it. I personally made really good experiences with flyers and public spaces, I have the feeling that sometimes people don’t like to read emails, especially when they’re a bit long, and a flyer somehow catches your, your eye, and you’re more likely to catch the interest of the person or flyer or poster. So, I think this is always a really good way.
And then, of course, take every opportunity, how you can talk to other Graduate Students Association. So, my university, for example, has a welcome day at the beginning of every semester, and you could go there and talk to others. You could also have your own booth and, and make, make yourself visible on these kinds of things. Coming to the communication with the existing members, there are a lot of different ways how you can do it. You can use of course google docs and all the other things that are offered there. You can use slack I don’t know if everyone is familiar with it, it’s an, it’s an app, and it’s really, a good way to communicate. You can create your own mailing lists, I have to say, since I know slack I really prefer this app. Mailing lists can also, as I said, sometimes you are overwhelmed with emails, it can just get annoying. You can have different features that people can update website; sorry I was at the next point already update the website with members each year. Yeah, so make sure to be updated on your website that not all the alumni are on the website but that the members that are actually active are on there.
I was at this point – can submit content for the newsletter. So, you can have this feature that your members can go to your website and add content there what they want to have in the newsletter. What they want to talk about, what they want to, to get out there and also in the newsletter important organizational news should be highlighted and as I said before in the social media accounts, they should be highlighted as well. The website should house all your event information so if you have something going on it should be on the website. Because that’s. If people look at your website they want to know what you’re doing, and you should be making sure that it’s updated and everything. Okay, so how can you connect with their external community. Again, a mailing lists, flyers and be present at open events, so also reach out, out of your university out of your network to other universities, maybe you have a friend somewhere or, I don’t know and try to connect with them. Spread the word that a network like this is possible and that it’s an easy setup, and that everyone can, can do it. Yeah, again, social media, email, newsletter, have a brand, have a nice logo that makes you recognizable, outreach to potential collaborators, don’t be shy. Always try, always try to talk. And if you can, speak to the media. Just as Wendy did last week, making this podcast. Already advertising a little bit publicity is good. So, so try to be as open as possible. for, for everything.
[Wendy]
So, I really appreciate all of the panellists you are phenomenal to work with and everyone has had such an interesting diversity of experiences. So, thank you to all the participants and guests who came today. We would really, really appreciate it if you did fill out this feedback form, and we look forward to. Filling needs and requests that you have of us so please don’t be shy, get involved in Dragonfly if you’d like or bring us to your campus or, you know, get in touch and let us know if we can set things up for you all to do better. You know and cultivate mental health at your own institutions. Thanks a lot, everyone. Thank you.
