Building Resilience: Peer psychological first aid for youth
- WISE
- Sep 17
- 5 min read
Ella O’Driscoll (she/her) is a 2025 Chuck Green Fellow from Macalester College, where she is double majoring in Psychology and Political Science with a Concentration in Human Rights and Humanitarianism. Throughout the summer she has been developing a Peer Psychological Aid Project that will be used to inform WISE’s GGAL participants about how to support their peers and build their own emotional resilience.
Written by Ella O'Driscoll
Being a Chuck Green Fellow at Macalester College involved spending the spring semester learning about how civic engagement in the twin cities can create change, critically examining the kind of change you want to make and then implementing that change over 10 weeks in partnership with an organization in the Twin Cities.
As a St Paul-based nonprofit that supports immigrant and refugee women and girls through educational programs like Girls Getting Ahead in Leadership (GGAL), I knew that partnering with Women’s Initiative for Self Empowerment (WISE) would allow me the opportunity to develop a project that would connect my passions for mental health provision and serving the refugee and immigrant communities in the Twin Cities.
During my time working with a humanitarian training organization in Wales (my home country), I was introduced to the concept of Psychological First Aid (PFA). Often used alongside its physical First Aid counterpart, humanitarians are increasingly being trained in PFA to prepare them to provide effective psychological care during emergencies and mitigate some of the devastating long term impacts of traumatic situations. For my project with WISE, I wanted to explore how the concepts of PFA could be adapted to help young people build emotional resilience and practice trauma-informed peer support. Even though most young are unlikely to need to respond to crisis scenarios, at some point most will face complex challenges or the responsibility of supporting those they care about through traumatic experiences. I wanted my project to focus on providing them with tools and resources that would give them the confidence to help other people, while not sacrificing their own mental, emotional or physical wellbeing.
With the support of the staff from WISE, over the past 10 weeks, I have researched trauma-informed care, developed a “Resilience Journal” and “ Peer Psychological First Aid Checkcards” which girls in WISE’s GGAL program will be taught how to use through a two-part workshop.
Why a resilience journal?
When our friends or loved ones are struggling — whether they’re processing a traumatic past experience, trying to solve a problem or feeling anxious about the future, we want to support them. Being someone that people can turn to in hard times is amazing, but it can also take a toll on our own wellbeing. It is my belief that our ability to care for others starts with how well we care for ourselves. The Resilience Journal was therefore designed to help youth build emotional awareness and self-care habits that will make supporting their peers sustainable.
The journal provides a space for honesty, reflection, and future planning. It begins by allowing you to explore the foundations of your resilience — from how you breathe, sleep and eat to how you handle stress and build your support system. It then guides you through the before, during, and after moments of supporting others and offers a toolkit that can be returned to at any time, including in times of navigating your own challenges or for when you need to help others through theirs.
Key sections include:
Where you’re starting from: Through tracking your emotions over time and answering prompts such as “What does being resilient mean?” and “What would being more resilient allow you to do?,” the first section of the journal helps you to understand your emotional patterns, providing the foundation to be able to communicate how you feel more clearly.
Building your B.A.S.E.: B.A.S.E. being your Breathing, Actionable steps, Sleep and Eating habits. This section provides key information on these four daily pillars of wellbeing and provides actionable practices that will help you to increase your production of the hormones and neurotransmitters; dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, that are a part of the body’s natural reward system, and will help you to feel motivated, empowered, connected, and content.
The Stress Bucket model: This imagines stress as water filling a bucket. Stressors like school deadlines or relationship conflicts fill the bucket, while coping strategies are holes that let stress drain away. Short-term coping mechanisms (e.g., procrastinating or venting) are able to provide temporary relief however, they won’t reduce overall stress or prevent the bucket from overflowing. Journal activities in this section encourage youth to identify and implement long-term strategies such as better sleep routines and healthy communication, in order to "make the holes bigger".
Building a support system: This section explores the importance of recognizing and strengthening your support system. It also highlights how understanding cultural norms helps you to support others more respectfully by encouraging youth to think about how the people in their community express distress and their preferred ways of being supported.
Self-care strategies while supporting someone else: This guides you on how to maintain a sense of self awareness through stressful situations using grounding exercises and reflecting on your physical and emotional limits.
Decompression after supporting someone: After you’ve offered support, the journal provides tools for processing your own emotions in order to return to your own emotional baseline. This allows you to care for your own nervous system and make sure you’re not carrying the emotional weight of others.
Peer Psychological First Aid: The check cards
Alongside the journal, I created Peer Psychological First Aid (PFA) check cards. These cards outline a five step process to supporting someone, providing you with the tools to recognize emotional distress in others, offer basic support, and care for yourself throughout the process.
PFA is different from therapy as it aims to offer practical support that helps people maintain calmness and make effective next steps without encouraging them to recount traumatic experiences.
The 5 steps of Peer PFA:
Anchor – Prepare yourself to support your peers : Before offering support, the Anchor step allows you to understand what trauma is; who it affects and what different reactions may look like. This section also provides tools such as visualisation and tactical breathing to help prepare for different scenarios and encourage successful outcomes.
Notice – Recognise when someone needs support: This step highlights how to stay attuned to shifts in behaviour, physical and emotional states that may signal distress in those around us.
Support – Offer your support through listening and care. This step outlines how to use effective communication while supporting peers through body language, active listening, grounding techniques and verbal communication.
Connect – help them take the next step: This step involves understanding how to recognise when professional help is needed, knowing what resources are available in different scenarios, how to direct people towards them, and ultimately how to disengage from the conversation with care.
Decompress – process within yourself after looking after others. The final section of the cards directs you back to the decompression techniques outlined in the Resilience Journal.
Reflections
This fellowship has provided me with the opportunity to merge my academic interests with real life community impact. It has been a privilege to see the impact of WISE and to play even a small part in its mission to empower immigrant and refugee women through leadership development and education.
The Resilience Journal and the Peer PFA Check Cards were designed to be used alongside one another. In depth training of how to use each resource will be provided to the youth participating in WISE’s GGAL program in a two-part Peer PFA workshop that incorporates structured teaching, group activities, and individual journaling sessions. However, digital versions of both resources are provided below for those who are interested in developing their own Peer support skills but are not a part of WISE’s GGAL cohort.
I’m grateful to WISE for trusting me with this project and to the GGAL participants who use these resources.
Download the PFA Toolkit
Peer PFA Resilience Journal
Peer PFA Check Cards