Tending The Garden: What organic youth peer support can teach us about building systems that care

Youth peer support (YPS) is an evidence-based model of care in which young people with lived experience (YPWLE) provide recovery-oriented support to peers navigating similar challenges. On many college campuses this work already happens informally, without training, compensation, or institutional recognition. This narrative essay examines The Garden, a unit of a student mentor-mentee program at the University of California, San Diego, that organically evolved into de facto YPS, providing students mutual aid spanning acute crisis, identity formation, and navigation of the hidden curriculum of higher education. Drawing on first-person accounts, we show that The Garden often operated in place of institutional mental health and advising systems, providing immediate, person-centered support grounded in shared lived experience and human rights. A competency mapping across these accounts demonstrates that The Garden consistently reflected practices the YPS literature identifies as central and effective. We argue that higher education largely lacks both the infrastructure and the institutional power reflexivity to recognize, train, and sustain this labor, manufacturing an invisible and inequitable burden for students. We call on higher education institutions to meaningfully invest in YPS infrastructure, centering youth leadership and community ownership. When institutions seek to scale YPS without ceding power they risk co-optation, stripping student spaces of the autonomy and trust that make them effective and accessible. Drawing on youth participation scholarship, we distinguish recognition from control and propose recommendations across policy, funding, programming, campus climate, and research to build YPS infrastructure that reflects students’ lived realities.