Task force sets goals for more inclusive campus

The Gender-based Violence Prevention Task Force met Wednesday to discuss their objectives to support a safe University environment. 

What happened?

Kelli Raker, a coordinator for violence prevention programs and co-chairperson of the task force, started by laying out two main tasks for the meeting. 

“One of them is to look at initiatives that we have and the recommendations that go along with those,” she said.

Raker said the group would also evaluate their list of new objectives to determine which are worthwhile.

“We’re going to go through and rank those as high priority, low priority or potentially remove them off of the list of things to continue considering,” she said.

Who spoke?

The meeting was led by Raker and Jenn Scott, Title IX program coordinator and other co-chairperson of the task force. 

Raker spoke about accomplishing goals in terms of one-year, three-year and five-year objectives.

“I think the fun part of our year-one goals is that we’re already doing them and accomplishing them in this moment,” she said.

One goal was supporting existing diversity skills trainings. Terri Phoenix, director of the LGBTQ Center, said additional funding could expand the reach of LGBTQ education. 

“Our target every year is to train at least 500 staff, students and faculty and we typically exceed that by 150,” Phoenix said. “But with human resources that’s always a stretch.”

Phoenix was interested in opportunities to train additional facilitators and volunteers and also liked the idea of exploring possible pay for facilitators.

Some of the new objectives discussed in the meeting were connecting violence prevention to student organizations, supporting the new alcohol policy, working on social norms campaigns, creating a "University 101" course and combating implicit bias. The task force found all five goals to be of high importance.

Task force members thought it would be important to create trainings on implicit bias for not only students but also faculty and staff. This type of training could also encompass micro-aggressions.

“We’re talking about campus climate change and it has to include faculty and staff,” said Leslie Lerea, associate dean for student affairs in the graduate school. 

The implicit bias training and other new objectives are still in the early stages of thought.

Why was this meeting important?

This meeting provided a baseline for the goals the task force intends to develop further in upcoming meetings. At the conclusion of the meeting, task force members formed small groups to further target these goals before the next large group meeting.

The task force will use these objectives to make an official recommendation on how the University can best educate students, faculty and staff on gender-based violence prevention messages.

When are they meeting again?

The task force meets on the second Wednesday of every month from 10 a.m. to noon in Union room 3409. The next meeting is on Oct. 12.

@natalieaconti

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