Guardly Shares the Key to a Successful Project
Ceremonies took place in Ottawa yesterday to commemorate the anniversary of the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, where 14 young women were killed in Montreal in December 1989. These ceremonies come on the tailwinds of the Penn State sexual violence scandal, where a football coach had been assaulting young boys for decades.
Twenty-two years later, and sexual violence against students is still a continuous threat. However, there is still hope for a future free from violence on campuses. In fact, as you read this there are several groups forming on campuses across Canada to think up innovative ways to put an end to this problem that continues to plague us.
On November 25th, the Federal Minister for Status of Women, Rona Ambrose, announced a call for proposals for projects to address violence against women on post-secondary campuses. The federal government will accept project submissions until January 27, 2012 and can provide funding of up to $200,000; the Call for Proposal recommends projects to be led by Student Unions and On-Campus Women’s Centres and promotes the development of partnerships between campus security, corporations and other organizations that may help to decrease violence against women.
“I think one of the things that concerns me the most is complacency in large institutions. We saw that with something very recent with Penn State University,” Ms. Ambrose said in an interview last week. “That’s why I’m targeting the students here, not targeting the institutions.”
Guardly has been working to build a relationship with the Status of Women to better understand what a comprehensive proposal should look like. The website explicitly states that “campus awareness and prevention campaigns should not be the only or primary focus of the proposed initiative.” From our working knowledge, we recommend closely adhering to the Key Activities listed on the website. Further, we urge you to consider including Guardly’s Safe Campus solution as a component of your overall proposal and consider partnering efforts to empower women on campus to foster a safer campus environment. Guardly offers a unique value proposition to women walking alone on campus and can help make your project stand out amongst others submitted for consideration. For any group looking to learn more about how we can fit into the proposal you are putting together, please reach out to me to setup a brief call; my contact details are at the end of this post.
Key Activities
The following Key Activities (bolded items) have been extracted from the Status of Women call for proposal:
a. Engage and establish working partnerships with women and men on campus; and as applicable, with campus community stakeholders.
There is no excuse for allowing women to be targeted on campus because of their gender. Our goal is to work with universities to help create a new model to end violence against women on campus. The Guardly Safe Campus Program is perfect for helping students leverage existing resources dedicated to safety on campus. We hope to compliment your existing prevention and awareness programs, helping to drive student buy-in and overall engagement. Our mobile applications allow students to be both proactive and reactive about their personal safety. For example, users are encouraged to create groups of responders that they can alert in times of an emergency. As a responder, you are asked to accept an invitation to join someone’s safety group. Each new responder added to the Guardly network associated with your campus helps to build overall awareness of your campaign fighting violence against women. Guardly Safe Campus assists you in building a campus community that looks out for one another. This effectively changes the social dynamics of how students look out for their own personal safety and for the well being of their campus community.
Guardly promotes the participation of men, women, faculty, staff and others in your campus community to commit to looking out for one another.
b. Plan project and adapt to local campus needs:
- conduct a gender-based analysis with respect to gender-based violence and the specific needs of young women;
- work with young women to identify their priorities, viewpoints and potential strategies for addressing gender-based violence;
- work with stakeholders to collectively identify gaps, priorities, opportunities, valuable resources and supports and potential strategies;
- collaborate with stakeholders to ensure tangible results for young women and a coordinated campus community response to gender-based violence;
- identify existing institutional mechanisms and supports as well as gaps (e.g., policies, programs, services, models, strategies, frameworks, planning and decision-making processes, etc.); and
- identify promising practices to address the issue of violence against women on campus.
Over 70% of students have smartphones on campus, and this number increases at a fast clip.[1] Despite the prevalence of mobile phones on campus, almost 81% of on-campus sexual assaults are not reported to the police.[2] We are helping to address the 81% of women who have not called for help. We’ll work directly with your Student Unions and Women’s Centres to administer surveys to help identify any communication gaps that are preventing those threatened on campus from accessing the services that are currently available to them. We can assist your project team members in working directly and/or virtually with students to educate them about the support lines that are available to them on campus and can demonstrate how to use Guardly to leverage these resources when in need. To further drive awareness, Guardly has developed a Campus Ambassador Program, supplying a select group of students on each campus with the materials necessary to educate and train students throughout the year.
c. Implement measures (policies, mechanisms, models and/or strategies) to address the identified issue(s). For example,
- Working directly with stakeholders, conducting and implementing campus safety audits on identified issues. These should identify and propose solutions to the broader safety issues facing young women on campus.
- Develop and implement a campus community plan to help deliver on strategies/approaches to address gender-based violence on campus.
- work with women, planning partners and community members to ensure effective implementation of the plan; and
- focus on a priority component of the plan (e.g., supports for university/college governance bodies and structures for ensuring gender-based factors are considered in decision-making, planning and management).
- Where campus community plans already exist, review to strengthen (e.g., by using gender-based analysis), update, implement a priority component, etc. Work with women, planning partners and community members to ensure effective implementation of the plan.
The Guardly Safe Campus Program has components that automatically track incidents and simplify reporting. This information can be reviewed to demonstrate the different emergency-related trends that women experience on your campus. However, what we are most eagerly looking to prove in working with partners across Canada, is that a Guardly Safe Campus actually has far fewer violent acts committed per annum than it did before such a system was in place. We can work directly with Campus Security, IT, and Communications departments at your university to identify high-risk areas on your campus where the majority of Guardly calls are made and help to facilitate awareness with your project team to ensure women are made aware of these areas.
We can work alongside your team to help with implementation. For campus plans that already exist, we hope that Guardly will present an opportunity to strengthen the reach and overall engagement of your message across campus.
Partnership Opportunities:
Adam Levine
Business Development, Guardly Corp.
Mobile (647) 501-4266
[2] U.S. Department of Justice “Final Report: Understanding Crime Victimization Among College Students: Implications for Crime Prevention.
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