UCT Interact Club Emphasizes Peer Mediation And Peacebuilding
At Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical School (UCT), the Interact Club is no new thing. It has been around for more than a decade, attracting high school students from all disciplines and walks of life and bringing them together through Rotary Club principles like service, leadership and hands-on community work.
All of these things are still true for today’s Interact Club, but there is also a renewed sense of responsibility that brings an air of inspiration to the club. That sense of responsibility, something the students agreed they feel within their group, might have spurred the club’s most recent venture: a presentation on peacebuilding, conflict resolution and peer mediation to 65 Rotary clubs in the region, with the intention of implementing and coaching other groups on their tried and true methods.
Beth Griffin has served as a mentor for UCT’s Interact Club for about eight years and is a Rotarian of the Rotary Club of Bourne-Sandwich. She is also part of Rotary’s initiative around peacebuilding—the process of creating peace in a place of conflict—something she said really resonated with the students, who took it upon themselves to address the subject through a PowerPoint presentation and video.
“I love what I do; I’m blessed,” Ms. Griffin said. “When you have kids committed to making a difference, it’s a powerful thing. It’s powerful for them to be able to showcase what they’ve done but it’s also powerful to be their adviser around it.”
UCT’s Interact Club president Grace Ames, a senior from Sandwich, and vice president Madi Neal, a senior from Bourne, presented the club’s slideshow and video to Rotary club members over Zoom on February 7. It was nerve-wracking, Madi said, to make a presentation in front of so many people. But afterward? “I felt amazing.”
“The presentation basically goes over all the ways you can resolve a conflict,” Madi said, “because there is no one true way you can resolve a conflict. All conflicts are very different, and the presentation goes over several different ways you can help people feel a little more included and stress-free.”
A few of the resolution techniques brought forth by the Interact Club are peer mediation, talking circles and clear communication. Those activities are intended to keep everyone grounded and able to open up in the face of groupwide or personal conflicts.
“If you’re in a stressful environment or a hateful environment,” Madi said, “you’re not going to have too much creativity, engagement and all of that fun stuff.”
The club showcased how peacebuilding techniques can work using their own mock conflict video, “How To Resolve A Conflict,” in which club members act out a mock conflict and then work with a peer mediator to create peace in its place.
Haydenn Augusta, a sophomore from Falmouth, explained that the video shows herself and another sophomore, Kaitlyn Wright of Sandwich, experiencing a misunderstanding. Haydenn laughs at something, and Kaitlyn takes it personally. Once things escalated, a peer mediator—a fellow student and club member, sophomore Lillie Afonso of Falmouth—steps in to help the girls work through it. Ground rules are set—no name calling or talking over each other—and then the mediation begins.
“During it we stressed ‘I’ statements, so ‘I feel this way,’ or ‘I thought this happened, instead of blaming,” Grace said, “which I think sometimes can happen when there is not a mediator and guidelines for when you are talking. It can kind of become a blame game. Then once Kaitlyn told her story, Haydenn would have to repeat what Kaitlyn said and the same the other way. I think it helps understand what’s going on—you take a step back and try to understand the other person’s point of view, so you don’t feel like you’re under fire.”
The presentation to other regional Rotary clubs was very well-received, Ms. Griffin said, so much so that Rotarians from other clubs want to promote and expand it.
“In addition to its being spread throughout the school, the goal would be for this type of presentation to be shown in other Rotary clubs, with the kids being presenters to the clubs themselves,” Ms. Griffin said.
Rotary International has more than 1.4 million members worldwide who tackle persistent global issues using a model that Ms. Griffin called “service above self.” Some of the issues taken up by Rotary in addition to peacebuilding are fighting disease, supporting education, growing local economies and providing clean water, and disaster response.
“It’s people coming together to make the world a better place,” Ms. Griffin said. “The important thing for me, as their adviser working with these great, talented kids, is that they want to make a positive change in the school and within themselves on how to deal with conflicts and resolution.”
The goal of the mock conflict video and presentation, Ms. Griffin said, is to take peer mediation schoolwide, but the Interact Club’s ambitions do not stop with UCT and the Rotary club.
“We’re hoping that we get to present our ideas and our video to other schools at some point, hopefully,” Grace said. “That was our main thing. I know for me, personally, there are situations throughout my high school career that I think a peer mediation would’ve helped a lot more with miscommunications through friend groups. So our hope is to integrate that not only into our school and our Interact Club but with other Interact Clubs and schools as well.”
The Interact Club at UCT has about 20 members and is pretty diverse, the students said. Members are drawn to the safe space aura of the club from all different grades and backgrounds. One member, Haydenn, said she joined because her friend and mock conflict co-star Kaitlyn was in it, and she thought it looked like fun.
“Making friends and interacting with people, seeing what we do for the school—it’s just nice to get to know people and do things for the school and just say that I actually got to do something,” Haydenn said. “[We are] just trying to make a difference for the school.”
The group is largely peer-led and gives students the lion’s share of responsibility when it comes to planning and executing events, organizing around causes and generally just conducting their weekly meetings. The sense of responsibility is something that Grace, the club’s president, said she really enjoys.
“It gives us all opportunities to have leadership positions,” she said. “Not only me and Madi, but other people in the club as well get to feel out what that would be like.”
To Kaitlyn, one of the unique things about the Interact Club is its approachability.
“I think Interact is such a great opportunity for kids who want to get into something in the school because it’s not a sport where it takes skill,” she said. “There are no requirements: you just go sit in on a meeting and see if it’s something you would enjoy or want to help out your community.”
The students do a number of activities at UCT throughout the year, including a craft fair in November, candygrams on Valentine’s Day and an ice cream social for students with high academic honors. Some of their community work includes a recent project done in conjunction with the Bourne Fire and Police departments, Mass Heal, and the Bourne Substance Free Coalition—of which Ms. Griffin is the chairwoman—that had the students packing resource bags that would then be distributed to people struggling with addiction at local hospitals. The resource bags included a toothbrush, toothpaste, socks, resource pamphlets, stress balls and naloxone. Soon, Ms. Griffin said, they will have fentanyl testing strips to add to the resource bags.
UCT’s Interact Club was able to connect with other regional Interactors during a field trip earlier this school year to a peacebuilding conference. There they were able to mingle with Interact Club members from different schools and share thoughts with each other on conflict resolution and mediation.
“We would join tables together and sit with other schools and do a talking circle, pass around a shell and just share things, try to make each other more comfortable to speak and not be shy,” Haydenn said. “We talked about anything; anything could be a topic, and I could tell that we got more and more comfortable with each other as the topics went on.”
Talking circles are something the group has come to use often, not just as a means of conflict resolution, but also as a way to share ideas and get thoughts out in the open. Many of the members say they have used these same techniques that they have learned for peacebuilding outside of the club, in their daily lives.
A proud mentor of Interact, Ms. Griffin said there are a lot of good clubs at UCT but, to her, Interact is a special place.
“The diversity of the group, it’s like a safe place; it’s a safe place for kids to come,” she said. “They’re providing service, they’re providing kindness, they’re providing ways to make people feel good and make a difference. And for them, just the enjoyment that they get from it speaks volumes to me.”