GWHS PRC

Peer Leaders, Washington High School

Our group of seven represents a larger group of GWHS students dedicated to the vision and work of the Peer Resource Center. Led by two incredible adult mentors, Vicki Abadesco and Don Leach, in the early 1990s we engaged in activities related to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse; anti-racism; suicide prevention; sex education; and psychological healing. Profoundly influenced by the Peer Resource Center, we remember the transformational work of Peers:

Tina Bartolome: I remember how PRC Coordinator Vicki Abadesco was my first Filipina role model and supported me in starting an anti-racist club after the Rodney King verdict and LA Riots led to racial tension on campus.

Erica Boas: I worked mostly with Bottom Line, peer sex education. I fondly remember demonstrating how to put a condom on a plastic penis for other teens and feeling very empowered to normalize sexual pleasure and what was then referred to as “safe sex”.

Heather Clements: I worked in various Peer Resources programs. What I remember most is Vicki Abadesco and Don Leach. They were the adults in the school who created spaces for student voice. I often draw upon their vision and practice for student-focused and centered conversations in my own classroom.

Dona Hirschfield-White: In PRC I learned to be an ally and activist which, as a new immigrant grieving for my recently deceased mother, was powerful to feel a sense of purpose and emotional connection. I worked as a counselor and presenter in these teams; S.C.O.R.E. (Students Concern of Racist Events), Drug Education Action, Suicide Prevention, Teen Abuse Prevention, The Bottom Line (HIV and AIDS, communication about sexuality, health).

Ying-sun Ho: I worked on the Teen Abuse (preventing and surviving physical, emotional, and sexual abuse), Bottom Line (sex education and empowerment), and AWARE (anti-racist) teams, while becoming a leader in the greater Peer Resources program. I remember learning how to communicate and be in community with other people, making decisions and charting our way together.

Pamela Kong: I worked mostly in Suicide Prevention and Tutoring Program. I remember holding the confidentiality of others inviolate, learning active listening skills and applying them to every aspect of my life, and empowering self and others.

Mario Trigueros: I found home at the Peer Resource Center among other teens healing themselves and offering to support others in the process. I was a bisexual (was just discovering what that actually meant), Latino young man who’d just moved from LA and worked on Suicide Prevention and Bottom Line. I found my lifelong partner and my best friends at PRC.

Each of us has spent the past years engaging in work and building relationships shaped by our work with Peer Resources. Following, we further detail the many ways in which Peer Resources has impacted us to effect change in the world:

Tina, queer daughter of immigrants from the Philippines and Switzerland, writer and popular educator, is here on this earth to train up the next generation of troublemakers and storytellers.

Workshops on sexual health, decision-making, and communication that Erica Boas conducted with Peer Resources at GWHS deeply inform her current research and educational projects that center sexuality education and sexual consent practices.

Heather has been working in education for over a decade and is currently an instructor and Learning Disability Specialist at Chabot College in Hayward, CA. She participates in campus wide efforts to interrupt and challenge white supremacy in the classroom and throughout the academic process.

Dona is a politicized healer and somatic psychotherapist in the generative somatics tradition, supporting progressive social justice movements. For the last two decades she has worked with the queer community, youth, activists and trauma survivors using a transformative justice framework. She has also worked with movements envisioning alternatives to the criminal injustice system and child protective services.

Ying-sun has been an organizer and activist in San Francisco and the Bay Area since he was a kid. He is now using his PRC training to help lead LeftRoots, a national organization of social movement leftists working to develop strategy for socialist transformation in the U.S., and to develop the leaders who can carry such strategy out.

Pamela is an advocate for workers’ rights and tenant rights throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Confidentiality, active listening, and client empowerment remain at the core of her law practice.

Mario Trigueros has been working at the intersection of healing and justice ever since his years at Peer Resources. He’s worked in education, youth development, program development and technology and is currently the Director of Educational Programs at Pachamama Alliance, a non-profit that prepares leaders committed to building an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just future.