Jana’s Campaign Sponsors Regional Summit on Campus Safety

Jana’s Campaign, Inc., with the single mission of reducing gender and relationship violence, capped off a successful weekend in hosting the first ever Heartland Campus Safety Summit in Kansas City, Missouri, on Friday November 8.  Well over 140 participants representing 42 schools across a five-state region attended this one-day workshop providing practical guidance and knowledge designed for key campus personnel.

Topics included Title IX obligations and requirements, the Campus SaVE Act, bystander intervention programming, peer education prevention, and beyond.  The complete program can be found online at http://www.heartlandsummit.org/program/.

Keynote speaker was Steven Healy, Managing Partner of Margolis-Healy Solutions for Safe Campuses. Healy was Director of Public Safety at Princeton University from 2003 through 2009 and Past President of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.  Healy contributed significantly to the national dialogue about campus safety and security in the aftermath of the tragic rampage-shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007.

Additional nationally-recognized speakers included Claudia Bayliff, attorney at law, who spoke about how language helps shape our response to sexual violence, and Alan Heisterkamp and Annette Lynch from the University of Northern Iowa Center for Violence Prevention on the importance of using curriculum infusion to move skills from the classroom into the world beyond.

The Summit was particularly geared toward campus representatives from the states of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa.  Legal representatives, public safety officers, student leaders, residential life and student affairs personnel, and all other campus and community members interested in campus safety were invited to attend.

“Respectful, non-violent relationships are of benefit to the entire campus community.  No one is immune from possible violence, as the story of our organization’s namesake Jana Mackey shows, and as such, this summit really was for everyone connected with the university environment.  I was especially impressed with the significant student attendance, showing a strong passion for consumer self-advocacy,” said Jana’s Campaign Executive Director Eric Sader.

Campus leaders were encouraged to create a comprehensive and integrated approach to preventing and responding to gender violence at their institutions.  The Summit aimed to transform area colleges and universities to prevent abusive behaviors by engaging faculty, staff, and students in promoting healthy relationships; ensure that the institution is prepared to respond promptly and effectively to incidents and reports of violence when they do occur, and; ultimately change campus norms so that campus members hold themselves and each other to respectful and non-violent standards of interpersonal behavior.

Major sponsorship for participants from the states of Kansas and Missouri was provided by the Kansas Health Foundation and Partners in Prevention.  Also, staff assistance and support was provided by the Women’s Leadership Project at Fort Hays State University.

Funding from the Kansas Health Foundation will ensure another successful conference in 2014.

About Jana’s Campaign, Inc.

Jana’s Campaign believes that colleges and universities should be mobilized to reduce gender violence.  This includes encouraging higher education to improve their prevention efforts and response to gender violence on campus and to play a more active role in using their resources to impact the communities in which they reside.  Find out more at www.janascampaign.org.

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