Deploying Community Cultural Capital: Peer Guidance and Counselling Among Eritrean Refugees and Asylum Seekers in England

This article explores peer guidance and counselling among Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in England. It focuses on the motivations, benefits, and challenges of peer counsellors working with Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers. The article is theoretically informed by culture-centred counselling and Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth framework. Data was also collected using focus group discussions. The findings highlight how Eritrean peer counsellors utilise their aspirational, social, linguistic, and resistant capital to provide culture-centred advice, guidance, and support. They thus resist the individualised and neoliberal problem-solving techniques which often underpin approaches to counselling in England and other parts of the Global North. They volunteer to engage in peer counselling because they understand the vulnerability of refugees and asylum seekers, a situation the peer counsellors have previously been in their own lifetime. The peer counsellors feel a sense of responsibility and satisfaction from helping others, even though they face emotional and resource challenges. This article informs the cultural learning processes of refugees and asylum seekers, while also providing alternative strategies to address their social and mental wellbeing.