Unknown userMember
Increasing peer support opportunities in the forums? What do you think?
Hi everyone,
As you many of you know, we currently have our wonderful guide role in our community. This is a member who helps to role model the forum principles and help orientate, welcome and support new members. We have had some ideas and thoughts about wanting to offer more opportunities for different roles in the community.
As the forums have grown we have noticed some flags:
- We only provide the one opportunity for members to get involved in an official way
- Criteria to become a CG is quite specific which means fewer community members are able to apply
- Having a small number of Community Guides risks pressure to carry too many responsibilities potentially and means that we can’t always get to all the posts that we might want to
- We want to offer more members the opportunity to upskill in peer support
As a first idea, based on what we have seen other communities do successfully and thinking about how we can provide more opportunities for a range of responsibility levels we thought about growing the Community Guide program into a broader Participation Program having two components of this program:
- There could be Program A and Program B for instance:
- Program A would be low commitment, low responsibility, have self-directed training and be quite autonomous
- Program B would be a higher level of commitment, more training and support, more responsibility and more tasks within the community. There would then be more potential for this to be a more official peer supporter role
Having shared our thoughts above, we would love to know your thoughts and how you feel about this idea? 
Look forward to hearing from you all!
