Some of the most meaningful work on campus begins in conversation. It grows through the trust built between students who want to create change and those who help carry their ideas forward. For Sam Thiry, Director of Wellness Programs, that work is tied to mentorship and the belief that students know how to speak to the realities of student life.
She describes her role through the language of stewardship because, for her, the work is about creating a launchpad for student voices. Her days involve strategy, logistics, and wellness promotion, yet the purpose underneath that work comes back to mentorship. She speaks about the process of watching a Peer Health Educator move from learning the ropes into becoming a confident advocate, someone able to educate peers with clarity, care, and conviction. She sees herself as a partner in that growth, someone who provides resources and a safety net so students can do the brave work of reaching their campus community.
That philosophy shapes the kind of environment she tries to build within the Peer Health Educators team. She wants a space rooted in trust, compassion, and creative freedom. She places a great deal of value on students’ expertise, trusting them to communicate wellness issues in ways that feel relevant, approachable, and authentic to their peers. She wants team members to feel seen and heard, and from that foundation, she hopes they leave the program with a strong sense of self-efficacy. She hopes they come out on the other side with the knowledge that they made a difference, and with confidence in their own ability to shift culture.
That vision becomes visible in the events and initiatives that grow out of the program. One of the strongest examples is Hear Us Now, the annual benefit concert held in recognition of Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
For Thiry, Hear Us Now reflects exactly what can happen when students are given room to imagine something meaningful and then trusted to build it. The event began in fall 2023, when former Peer Health Educators Nicole Beckles ’24 and Sarah Forkin ’25 brought the idea to her. She remembers both of them as deeply motivated and excited to create a campus event with a clear purpose, one that aligned with WEVP’s mission and with their own values. Their idea has since become one of the most visible expressions of peer health educators’ work on campus.
Hear Us Now was created to raise awareness about sexual violence, empower survivors, and engage the campus community around an issue that calls for collective responsibility. Thiry speaks about the event as a space where advocacy becomes public, shared, and felt. She describes it as an act of joyful resistance, a phrase that captures the spirit of the event particularly well. Sexual violence is often surrounded by silence and isolation. Hear Us Now opens another kind of space, one filled with music, community, and care, where people gather with intention and where support becomes visible.
The event carries that feeling because of the amount of thought and labor students put into it. Peer Health Educators are central to nearly every part of the process. Thiry says they really run the show. Each year they create a new theme for the concert, conduct outreach to student performers, nominate and invite faculty and staff to participate as celebrity bartenders, design digital content and promotional materials, create the event t-shirts, develop a themed mocktail menu, imagine how the space should look and feel, and help with setup, teardown, and emceeing throughout the night. The event reflects student leadership at every level, from concept to execution. Thiry’s role is to guide that work, support it, and help students carry it through.
Hear Us Now also depends on a wider network of collaboration. Thiry points to strong partnerships with the Alice Drum Women’s Center, CEC, It’s On Us F&M, Dining Services, and the YWCA Lancaster, all of which play an important role in making the event possible each year. That collaborative effort gives the concert a campus-wide and community-connected dimension, while keeping students at its center.
Her connection to this work is also shaped by her own professional path. She did not begin in peer health education. She was originally training to become a therapist, and during graduate school she interned in a Title IX office, where she first encountered Peer Health Educators. That experience changed the direction of her work. After graduation, she served as a sexual trauma therapist and later became F&M’s inaugural campus advocate. Part of her time was spent supporting survivors directly in clinical settings, while another part was spent alongside the WEVP office doing prevention work. In those spaces, working closely with student leaders who were eager to influence their campus, she found herself drawn to the energy and possibility of student-led community building.
That history helps explain why Hear Us Now matters so much to her. The concert reflects the kind of campus culture she is trying to help build, one where prevention is active, visible, and communal, one where survivors are acknowledged and supported, and one where students learn that advocacy can take many forms.
When she thinks about what she wants people to carry with them after attending, she returns to a few key feelings. She hopes people leave feeling seen, supported, and less alone. She hopes they understand that there are members of this community working every day to amplify survivors’ voices, to support healing, and to seek justice. She also hopes they leave with a stronger awareness that ending violence in a community is a shared responsibility.
Seen through that lens, Hear Us Now says a great deal about Sam Thiry’s work as a whole. It shows what it means to mentor students in a way that gives them room to lead. It shows how Peer Health Educators shape campus culture and it shows how the WEVP office supports that process, helping student ideas become lasting forms of advocacy and community engagement.
Maria Fernanda Araoz Pozo is a contributing writer. Her email is maraozpo@fandm.edu.