Mr. Paul Stavely, DAA’s New Well-Being Advisor: “I Kind of Turned Into the Person I Needed Back in High School”

During his three years at DAA he noticed that there was a gap because they really didn’t have a wellbeing advisor and he volunteered for it because it was always something he wanted to do in an unofficial sense. Although he volunteered for such an important job, he is also a film studies teacher. As imagined, having two roles that require full time and attention is very hard to manage but it isn’t his first time.

He talked about how he was once a teenager, too, and how he always struggled with full uncertainty and a lack of confidence. He always wanted someone he could talk to, a teacher who genuinely cared, so he thought he should be that person. He struggled with his mental health his entire life and knew how difficult it is to deal with it, so he decided to become a wellbeing advisor to kind of fill that gap. In order to try and assist his kids, he first only read books about mental health. He then organized small groups in the schools where he taught. He never really intended to become a wellbeing advisor as a teenager, so helping people with their wellbeing was something he thought was interesting by mistake.

The reason it became his job as an unofficial thing was because he would like to continue in that field in his later career but he doesn’t really have any qualifications so he’s working on it as an extracurricular. He’s currently working on his master in mental health and psychology and he’d wish that one day in the future he would have the qualification to take on an official job at a school.