According to the Workers' Assistance Program, Peer Assistance and Leadership began in Texas in 1980 as a "peer helping" program, combining "peer assistance" and "peer leadership" strategies originally developed in the late 1970's. The PAL program is an award-winning, Nationally Recognized Evidence-Based Prevention Program owned and operated by the non-profit organization, Workers' Assistance Program, Inc. (WAP). The mission of the PAL program is to enable young people to use their potential to make a difference in their lives, schools, and communities.
Over the last couple of decades, WAP has significantly enhanced and expanded these basic prevention strategies, evolving the PAL peer helping program from an informal, extra-curricular activity in a single school district, into a formally structured, curriculum-based program, adopted by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) as an accredited elective course.
The PAL (Peer Assistance and Leadership) program recognizes an innate capacity for social understanding, personal well-being, and community participation within every student. PAL nurtures and builds capacities to help youth increase resiliency and build protective factors to help them achieve school and social successes which lead to a productive life. This versatile course creates environments in which youth participate in productive pursuits with peers, using decision making, higher order thinking skills, and resiliency building. PAL students learn to adapt the power of peer pressure to influence others positively and, ultimately, they make a difference in the lives of others. Positive peer influence is utilized as a central strategy for addressing issues like bullying, low achievement, at-risk youth, drop-out prevention, substance abuse prevention, teen pregnancy, suicide, absenteeism, behavior problems, and other community issues.
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