They sit down at a table in the crowded Bookie coffee shop, the conversation as casual as the people’s around them. They talk about the upcoming election, their favorite song, the class they do not like and the test they have next week.

As the conversation meanders, a series of questions follows. How are they doing? Is there anything they need to talk about? What goals have they set and how are they working to meet them?

The answers and questions vary from mentee to mentee. For the Gender Identity/Expression and Sexual Orientation Resource Center’s (GIESORC) young mentoring program, there is no scripted formula for working with the students.

One young man told his mentor at one of their regular meetings that he had kissed another man for the first time. His mentor, economics graduate student Tyler Laferriere smiled at the memory of the breakthrough.

“It was like, ‘Yes, we did it! We brought you to fruition.’ Obviously it wasn’t that easy afterward but just sort of getting to that point,” Laferriere said. “It’s like yes, someone felt safe enough and comfortable enough in themselves that they embraced the moment.”

There are about 88 mentees in the GIESORC mentoring program, but because of the self-guided nature of it the number that frequently meets with Laferriere and engineering student Travis Holloway is much smaller.

Although not massive, the smaller size allows for the two mentors to meet one-on-one to talk about issues of gender and sexuality, academics and social life or to just simply be there when needed.

For some students, it quickly became a lifeline since its upstart this past summer. Just a week into the program, a student contacted Holloway, their mentor, and said they were feeling suicidal. Holloway was able to mobilize the campus resources the student needed and be there to make sure they had the follow-up necessary to recover.

“I helped the student out of that position,” Holloway said. “I knew that had I not been there or had I not guided a conversation out of there that maybe they wouldn’t even be here today. My biggest take out of this is that I can really help someone that is struggling badly.”

Issues of mental health, harassment and for those not out, the fear of being ostracized by loved ones are prevalent. GIESORC was created to combat issues like those and create a safe space for students. The mentoring program is a direct extension of that.

“We want to offer resources to our students because LGBT students are at a high risk for dropping out of school, especially trans students; they are at a really high risk of dropping out of school because of a lack of support, lack of visibility, lack of people understanding the issues and concerns that they have,” GIESORC Director Heidi Stanton-Schnebly said. “There is nobody to help show them the ropes. Being LGBT doesn’t show. It’s not like you can look at someone and know what their sexual orientation is.”

Harassment, higher rates of sexual assault and mental health issues make the community especially vulnerable. Although little research is available on exactly what those numbers may look like, a handful of studies paint an urgent picture.

Thirty-three percent of LGBTQ students and 38 percent of transgender students have seriously considered leaving their institution because of harassment issues on campus, according to a State of Higher Education study.

A University of Washington study found LGBTQ students were three times as likely as heterosexuals to have planned to commit suicide in the past year and six times as likely to have actually attempted it.

Three in 4 LGBTQ students reported experiencing sexual harassment at college, according to a study by the Association of American Universities in 2014. Nine percent of LGBTQ-identifying respondents said they had experienced sexual assault involving penetration.

The mentoring program exists to combat those statistics. As mentors, Holloway and Laferriere use their own stories to connect with their mentees and build trust so that they feel comfortable coming to them with anything.

Holloway spent the first part of his undergraduate career at Whitworth. He had not yet come out when he arrived as a freshman. Holloway worked through it on his own, and said he stumbled academically for it.

“I really did work through it myself however, a lot of the things that I went through I really wished that I would have had someone with experience to help me with,” Holloway said. “Because there are a lot of paths, and a lot of pitfalls that can be dangerous and that can be bad so I really wish I would have had what I am trying to give everybody here.”

Holloway uses his role as a mentor to help guide students both academically and socially, ensuring that they are able to succeed in the classroom while coming to terms with how they are choosing to identify and working out the questions in their own mind.

“I know how much happier they are and how much of a relief it is to have that question answered and then working through those kind of ‘lights on’ moments to helping them succeed as just a college student and progress into the new stages of their lives,” Holloway said.

For Laferriere, who attended Gonzaga before coming to WSU for graduate school, he wrestled with several different learning curves after he came out in college. As he explored sex and sexuality, relationships, religion and what it meant to be a gay man he gained the experience and learning instances he now shares with his mentees. In turn, he continues to learn from the people he mentors about the depth of experiences both similar and wildly different from his.

“(Mentoring) challenges me to broaden my perspective. Yes, I am a gay man but I am also from an upper middle class Christian family who was very open and affirming,” Laferriere said. “It was awkward at first but my coming out story is remarkably tame compared to other people. They have to deal with screaming matches or they have to deal with the fear of being disowned or cast out from a family.”

It is the instances where he or Holloway may not have everything in common with their mentee that compassion falls in and takes the place of shared experiences. In the process of developing these relationships with their mentees, the mentors are in turn inspired by the resounding impact their mentee’s have.

“Just finding out how creative and driven they are and sort of finding out that maybe in a way I have been implicitly mentored by them, seeing what they are capable of and seeing what they need and what they want, that’s been the most rewarding thing for me,” Laferriere said. “As long as we touch one life and change one life, it would be rewarding enough and I think we have both done that.”

Right place, right time

The conversation had come up before. Having been through a lot in a year together, Holloway and Laferriere were relieved to have one another to lean on. The prospect of being able to give back by helping others and providing them with some support was never far from their minds.

When they arrived at WSU they went to Stanton-Schenbly’s office and asked if they could help with the mentoring program. There was no formal program in place, but in a stroke of luck, Stanton-Schenbly had been working on trying to start a program modeled after Multicultural Student Services’ existing program.

With two mentors in place, the next challenge was finding out how to reach out to people and bring those who were interested into the program.

Targeting freshmen and transfer students, Holloway and Laferriere tabled at Alive! sessions and Stanton-Schenbly ensured that at WSU recruitment fairs, students could sign up to have GIESORC resources provided to them.

Holloway and Laferriere went through sexual assault training, ally training, transgender ally training and a mental health first aid class, among others, in preparation for working with more students at the beginning of fall semester.

Although neither one had been a mentor before, both had been actively involved in LGBT organizations at their previous colleges. After completing the trainings, they were tasked with leading the students through Week of Welcome events and easing their transition into college.

What had not existed just months prior was now a first line of communication and introduction to the college environment for several freshmen and transfer students.

The plunge into mentoring was daunting at first, balancing relationships with many students of incredibly diverse backgrounds. For Holloway, getting to know each individual’s experiences and establishing that connection overrode any difficulty keeping up with everyone.

“It was difficult at first but what I realized was everyone has their own unique story,” Holloway said. “So it wasn’t hard to keep up with everybody’s story once you got to know them.”

Once they had identified the needs and found interest in students, the final piece of the puzzle was finding time to respond and also be a full time student. Both mentors wanted to have weekly workshops on issues that they had observed within the LGBTQ community, but were unable to do them as frequently as they liked.

“We came into it with a lot of ambition and with a lot of ideas and afterward we realized it’s hard balancing what being a mentor requires with academic life,” Laferriere said. “I think that was the hardest part, finding a balance of trying to build this program but at the same time, remembering that we are students first and we can’t do everything that we set out to.”

Not all ideas that Laferriere and Holloway came to the program with were able to come to fruition, but it left the program with room to grow and expand.

Moving forward

A year from now both Laferriere and Holloway will have graduated and moved on, leaving the mentoring program in the hands of new mentors working in a fully-integrated mentoring program with Multicultural Student Services (MSS).

They already have several applicants for next year. The new mentors will attend training courses with MSS and will have the other MSS mentors as their own support group.

Funding is in place to expand the program as well. The Office of the Dean of Students and the Vice President’s Office granted GIESORC the seed money to grow the mentoring program, providing more opportunities for mentors and mentees.

The program will look much different, but its goals remain the same.

“(I hope) that we have more success stories, that we get to see this is what happens when you believe in something and you just put the pieces together and allow the opportunities to happen,” Stanton-Schenbly said. “So I hope that a year from now, I’ll be able to tell you really great numbers.”

On the fourth floor of the CUB, in the middle of the GIESORC office there is a large, round table brightly decorated with tiles. A mirror hanging on the wall behind it is decorated similarly with tiles reading, ‘Create the world you want to see,’ ‘Words of change: hope, believe, create,’ ‘Coming out is scary but all it takes is time’ and ‘Never stop dreaming.’

Now, and a year from now, mentors and mentees will walk to the end of the hallway for the next ‘Nut Butter’ Wednesday or soup and sandwich night, for a safe place. The place is no different from the program. Its goals are one and the same. The mentor program provides a one-on-one relationship that is able to transcend any differences, there solely for the purpose of allowing people to be their authentic selves.