The AMS will be merging Vice and Speakeasy into AMS Peer Support, scheduled to be rolled out in time for the start of the school year in September 2020.
AMS Speakeasy provides peer support for UBC students and staff experiencing a wide array of personal struggles including mental illness, academic issues and family stresses, while Vice provides confidential support and outreach centred around addiction, including Naloxone training, workshops and peer dialogue sessions.
In a report submitted to AMS Council on March 25, AMS Student Services Manager Ian Stone presented the plan to merge the Vice and Speakeasy. The report highlighted how Vice has been strong in outreach and marketing while Speakeasy has a well-developed peer support program.
However, Speakeasy is not as strong with outreach and has stagnating usage rates while Vice is less cemented in the community and leads few support sessions. In an interview with The Ubyssey, Stone said that restructuring will allow for each service to work better to support students.
“The way that the current services are structured, there’s just certain strengths and weaknesses that I really feel can be mitigated by combining the services, restructuring things and … delegating the responsibilities in a different way that makes a bit more sense operationally,” Stone said.
In addition, the University of Alberta, Queen's University and McGill University have services that Speakeasy and Vice lack, such as a call line, external presentations and availability in languages other than English. The restructure could allow the AMS to bring those services to UBC.
In particular, AMS Peer Support will require coordinators and assistant coordinators to be certified through the Certified Peer Education Program, which Stone said would allow them to work on providing services in other languages. ‘’
“Once those fundamentals are clearly set, we'll be able to say, ‘Okay, well, if ... we can find some way to determine that you that you speak this language and you feel comfortable enough providing these services in this language, then we'll be able to move forward in providing those things,’” Stone said.
Stone hopes to structure AMS Peer Support similarly to the Sexual Assault Support Centre (SASC) with a peer-support branch and an outreach-and-education branch.
“[SASC’s] structure in terms of … their outreach team and then they have their support team seems to work well for them,” Stone said.
When asked about how COVID-19 will affect the proposed roll-out of AMS Peer Support in August or September, Stone said that they’re “planning for every possibility.”
Currently, Vice has cancelled planned outreach events while Speakeasy has moved its peer-support sessions online.
“I’m really hoping for a hard launch in September, maybe a softer launch in August or even earlier, depending on what the situation will be with school or campus..." Stone said.