While it’s easy for some to navigate the social world and adhere to social conventions, others can find it extremely difficult.
For some people, it’s not the lack of desire to develop and maintain friendships; it’s the challenge to initiate social interactions and associate with peers.
Match up with a peer coach
BePeers is an online service that pairs children and/or young adults with a peer coach based on geography, interests, and goals for virtual sessions from the comfort of their home.
According to the National Autistic Society (2017), adults with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder are likely be socially isolated for a number of reasons, including a lack of social skills to engage with others, the challenge to sustain appropriate social behaviours, bad experiences, and sometimes poor social networks.
We want to overcome this challenge! We believe that by giving people the skills and confidence they need to face peers, we will be helping them with lifelong social interactions.
We want to enhance skills, confidence and wellness, one interaction at a time.
Conversations, entertainment and social/life skills
BePeers connects anyone who experiences social and/or life skills challenges with a qualified peer coach of their choice for virtual interactions, guided conversations, entertainment, and social/life skills training.
We are developing an open-source coaching centre, a wide repository of resources and materials to support the pair during their sessions. We use a “self-determination model”, where each coach and coachee will set goals they wish to achieve and hold each other accountable. They can keep diaries of their meetings, recordings of their games and discussions. Or they can just hang out in our virtual “entertainment centre” of 80+ creative, logical, physical or expressive games.
We recruit peers from diverse backgrounds. Some of them like trains, other can talk about Star Wars, painting or comic books for hours. Our coaches believe in the cause. They’ve had previous personal or professional experience that proved to them how deep this social need is. Our coaches are also mentored by a licensed professional for any questions/ guidance they might need.
A supportive community
BePeers is not a counselling, advice, or guidance platform. BePeers is a supportive community whose aim is to enhance social skills and confidence. We’re here for anyone who needs a social coach, a buddy, and for their caregivers who sometimes feel like they’re their only friend.
Our peer coaching aim is never to “fix” someone. Rather, peer coaching can be as tailored, individual, and unique as the team who undertakes it. It’s a confidential process through which people work together to expand, refine, and build new skills, share ideas, solve problems, and teach each other through trust and established rapport. The main components are always Trust and Reflection.
We all have our strengths, and sometimes it takes one person who believes in us, listens to us, and gives us time to help us see them.
We strongly believe that BePeers, and peer coaching in general can and should be integrated into the neurotypical/ neurodiverse understanding and inclusivity challenge.
This is our mission today! Join us on your new journey and find us at www.bepeers.com or contact us at bepeers.team@gmail.com
More information
For more information about the founders, see the article ‘Ready for appier times?’ in the winter issue of Autism Eye Magazine. Click here for free digital subscriptions.