Last week CUNY’s Central Office of Student Affairs hosted a conference on “Peer Mentoring In Action: Driving Student Success.” The conference brought together funders, partners and representatives from every CUNY campus to highlight how peer leadership is supporting student success across the system.

The event, generously funded by The Gates Foundation, celebrated a growing recognition that students are often the most effective guides for one another, and highlighted the critical role they are playing in student enrollment and persistence at CUNY. CUNY’s Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Denise Maybank, opened the event with a question, and a challenge, for the room of over 100 participants: “What would it look like if every student at CUNY felt seen, connected, and supported by a peer mentor from the moment they began at CUNY?”

The convening was a culmination of a four-year initiative, College Connect, through which CARA worked in partnership with CUNY’s Office of Student Affairs to scale our peer-to-peer persistence model at several CUNY campuses, and to build capacity for the CUNY system as a whole. CARA staff and partners had the opportunity to present on the key components required to institutionalize programs that we outlined in Unlocking the Power of Peers.

Bill Tucker, Deputy Director of Education Pathways at the Gates Foundation and a keynote speaker at the convening, highlighted his appreciation for the ambition of the College Connect initiative. He applauded the intention to make peer mentoring a systemic part of what happens for all students at CUNY, shared his hope that peer mentoring programs would work to elevate the invaluable career-development mentors receive, and challenged the many programs present at the convening to work together to coordinate efforts around bold ideas to move peer mentoring forward at the university.

The convening afforded staff from various peer-to-peer programs, and CUNY leaders, the opportunity to collaborate with one another and to define core action items to propel systemwide change. Ideas ranged from formalizing a career pipeline for peer mentors at CUNY into related jobs, to providing shared training to peer mentors across programs, to building a “CUNY for Life” app that would help students and graduates connect to mentoring opportunities across the system.

One participant who has been running a peer-to-peer program on her campus for over ten years shared, “I was so excited about this conference – we’ve been running this peer to peer program so long and have never gotten to connect with others about best practices and challenges.”