Photo By Airman 1st Class Benjamin Riddle | Major Osgood, Deputy Director of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research – West,...... read more read more
Maj. Jeffrey Osgood, Deputy Director of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research – West, led peer ambassador training for airmen volunteers at the Summit Room on Joint Base Lewis-McChord on December 13, 2024.
Developed by WRAIR-West, the training familiarizes participants with support services available through the military while equipping them with the skills to connect service members to these resources.
“Life presents a lot of stressors —relationship stress, [being] first-time parents, financial challenges, and more,” said Maj. Osgood on the need for peer ambassadors. “The military has developed a lot of programs and services to help with those stressors, but many of these programs are underutilized. The hope is to train service members so they can connect their peers with the programs and services they need.”
The Summit Room, a community center for airmen on JBLM, reached out to WRAIR-West to host this required training for its volunteers.
“What we really want volunteers to do is listen to people’s needs and connect them to resources” said Erin Martin, the acting Director of Integrated Prevention and Resilience. “JBLM is a big base, and airmen aren’t always familiar with the support programs that are available. The Peer Ambassador training helps airmen find the support they need.”
Over the course of the initial and the make-up sessions, Maj. Osgood trained 19 airmen to be peer ambassadors. Trainees engaged in discussions about on-base support programs, participated in a virtual scavenger hunt to find important resources and practiced having conversations as a peer ambassador.
“The volunteers loved the training,” said Erin Martin. “Even individuals who had received similar training before were surprised by how much they learned. One staff member spent hours afterwards scanning the QR codes and showing other staff members the programs on base that she had no idea existed before.”
Preliminary results indicate that the training significantly increased participants’ knowledge and preparedness to provide peer-to-peer support. With these early sessions complete, peer ambassador training is ready for the next phase. “I’m eager to dig into the numbers and uncover what types of stressors service members most need help with” Maj. Osgood elaborated. “This is the phase of the project where we can implement the training at a wider scale to support even more of our service members.”
WRAIR-West is expanding the project to soldiers in the 62nd Medical Brigade in the Army, who will be trained to be peer ambassadors within their platoons. In addition to this new arm of the project, WRAIR-West plans to continue offering the training at centralized locations like the Summit Room. By training soldiers at the unit level and volunteers at the community level, it ensures that the resources will be able to help as many service members as possible.
“The Summit Room has only been open for just one month, and we’ve already welcomed 400 visitors,” Martin noted. “It is so gratifying to receive support like this training from our community partners like WRAIR.”
| Date Taken: | 02.13.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 02.13.2025 13:38 |
| Story ID: | 490733 |
| Location: | WASHINGTON, US |
| Web Views: | 73 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, WRAIR-West seeks to expand peer ambassador training after successful launch, by Zeke Gonzalez, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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