SAAM

Years ago, a friend who does this work in another community was expecting a baby. The baby was due in April, and we learned it was a girl. For months, we begged and teased the mother-to-be that she should name her daughter Sam.

SAAM (pronounced Sam) is Sexual Assault Awareness Month . . . or as we in the business think of it "April."

Every year, it is a challenge to plan new and exciting activities and events to capture the attention and interest of people in our community. This year, we have given ourselves an extra challenge of creating not just Awareness activities, but activities that will engage people and hopefully inspire them to work with us for longer term change.

This year, our focus population is college aged men. We have a week of activities on the local college campus planned to bring men to the table, peak their interest, and then sign them up to be mentors as well as help us petition the college to strengthen the language in the school's sexual assault policy.

We are hosting a "Dorm Storm" . . . and are lucky enough to have a frat that will go into all the men's dorms and put up posters and create a scene so that students are drawn to the action. We will be having a "white ribbon" campaign . . . asking men to sign a pledge that they will not condone, commit, or remain silent about sexual violence. All of the campus police will tie white ribbons to their vehicles in support of this activity. And, we have t-shirts that were designed by a student group we will be distributing to men on campus . . . and encouraging them to wear them to the spring football scrimmage for fun and prizes.

Our hope is that we will shift the thinking about sexual violence from "it's a girl thing" to "it's a problem for women, but an issue for men."

Non-profit world vs. corporate world

One of our co-workers is working through a family emergency right now. A grandparent is dying. The grandparent has been ill for some time, but has move down hill rapidly this week. I expect there will be a funeral early next week to attend.

As it would happen, next week is one of the busiest weeks on our calendars. A major fundraising campaign is ending next week, a major progress report is due, Sexual Assault Awareness Month kicks off with a week of activities, and I will be gone half the week attending a conference. Months of planning and work have gone into many of the activities planned for next week.

But, in non-profit world, especially crisis work non-profit world, we do this everyday.

With a couple well placed phone calls and emails . . . we have shifted coverage for all the activities and everything is moving smoothly.

Thats just what we do in non-profit crisis response world.

Quote of the week

Last week, one of our workers spoke to a women's civic group. You know, the nice older ladies who plant gardens and make sure local libraries have books.



Anyway, one of the nice older ladies said that her grandchild had come home from school the other day and said to her . . . with all seriousness . . .



Grammy Anita (name changed to protect the innocent), don't you ever let anyone touch your testicles."

She assured him that she would never let anyone touch her testicles.

Earning my keep

I know I've not written an entry in a while. My writing efforts are directed at grant season. My agency is a small, grassroots type organization. We aren't one of those large, foundation based organizations. So, each year, I have to write grants to keep our doors open and staff paid.

My husband teaches, and about this time of year starts getting term papers. I love the many, many reasons students have for not getting their papers written and/or turned in on time. In turn, my husband tells his students about how someday, keeping their jobs may depend upon getting a "term paper" in on time.

Imagine this, if you will. You spend all year doing your job. Getting up in the middle of the night to the blaring of the pager. You attend endless meetings. You generate reports and reports and reports. Then, as if none of that matters, you must reapply for your funding. You must generate an "application" that looks into not just what you accomplished in the past year, but what you promise to accomplish in the coming year. You answer specific questions in limited space. You generate attachments. You chase down board members to sign the application, and assurances you don't discriminate or send your money to terrorists.

There is an art to estimating what you can accomplish in the coming year . . . as well as how much money you will spend. You want to appear to be moving forward without promising to deliver the impossible. At the same time, you want to have reasonable expenses but you don't want to find yourself out of funds before the end of the year. At the same time, how do you estimate how many miles, exactly, you and your staff will travel each week a year from now? And how do you estimate how much you will pay for utilities a year from now?

Then, once you finish the application and double check each page to make sure you don't have glaring errors or gaps. Then, you make copies. The last grant I submitted was 105 pages long and required 13 copies, 3 hole punched. (And, I have one of the smaller grants submitted to this funder because I have only one program I for which I request funds.)

With some grants, a committee reviews what you have submitted. I have found that often the people who serve on these committees may or may not have a personal agenda. Other times, some of the people who serve on these committees don't have specific understanding of what victim service agencies do on a day to day basis. I've had committees ask me why don't we just lobby for women to have a curfew to keep them safe. One year, I had a committee come back and ask why we don't spend equal resources on male victims as female. Let's see . . . last year we had a total of 367 people served . . . of which 20 were male. Say we had a budget of $100,000. I don't see spending $50,000 on 20 victims and $50,000.00 on the other 347 victims.

Because I take seriously my responsibility to be a good steward of public funds, I get really annoyed when other non-profits abuse their funds. Every time a non-profit leader misuses, steals, or fudges their funds . . . all non-profits become objects of suspicion.

Also, it is a lot of pressure to know that other people are counting on me to do a good job on the grants so that they can keep their jobs, possibly get a little raise.

And, I really dislike feeling like I have to compete with other non-profits to keep our doors open. I struggle to walk the fine line between promoting how really good my agency is and not running down other agencies doing this work.

Epidemic

For this entry, I reference this article from the NY TIMES.

Studies have shown that a quarter of teen aged girls have a std. The study tested girls for four of the most common stds and found that half African American girls and twenty percent of white girls have at least one of the stds.

I find it interesting that the remedies suggested included widespread testing and vaccinating against the diseases. Only deep into the article, and in the form of a quote, is there mention that perhaps the trend could be reversed with comprehensive sexual education in our schools.

My more cynical side wonders if half of the white girls, or if the girls in the study came only from "middle to upper middle class" families, if there would be widespread cries for change? I also notice there is no mention of boys. I doubt that only girls have stds. I would be curious to see if such a study would ever be done on boys. I think parents, and our society, are much more willing to subject girls to an invasive and humiliating exam than boys.

Update

There has been an arrest in the case of the Auburn student who was murdered last week. The man charged in the case has been charged with, among things, attempted rape. According to the story in the NY Times, there appears to be no prior connection between the accused and the victim.

In another media report, a young woman, probably a student, was quoted as saying that students need to be more careful and that she'd seen women running at night with their iPods on, and how that just isn't safe.

I understand that we like to believe that we can control our environments and the people around us. We still cling the the notion that women hold responsibility for the behavior of men. We still assign to women more responsibility for their safety than men.

The fact of the matter is, you should be able to leave your personal belongings in your car, with the doors unlocked and windows open, and NO ONE should reach in and take them. Somewhere along the line, we forget that one of the first lessons we learn as children is to not touch what doesn't belong to us.

I feel this urge to, along with changing the messages we give men in the name of rape prevention, that we need to work on changing the attitudes women have about their own responsibility for the criminal actions of others.

Very bad

I wrote an entry earlier today about the two young women who were murdered on college campuses this week, but it seems to have disappeared.

I'll try to recreate what I wrote earlier. I've been having a hard time with personalizing, projecting in these cases.

I have a friend who sent me an op-ed piece earlier this year that made the point that some of the more horrifying shootings on school campuses have links to violence against women. The piece called for stronger social reactions to the "milder" forms of violence such as stalking and threats in order to prevent mass shootings and the more "severe" forms of violence.

It is too early yet to comment on what the possible motives could have been in either killing this week. I suspect that in both cases, the perpetrator saw young, slim, "nice" women as easier targets than someone who might at first glance be seen as more threatening.

I can't help but feel tremendous sympathy for the parents and friends of these young women. The Auburn student was, according to a media report I read, in a sorority. Those friendships are intense and develop quickly. I believe the killer victimized all the young women who called her "sister." The young woman in North Carolina seems to have been a rising star, someone who would give more to our world than she would take. I can't help but think that her parents were so close to being able to see their precious graduate from college. Surely, as student body president, she would have had many events to attend, honors to receive, and would have been a speaker at the graduation. It seems that all of that campus has been victimized. I can't help but think ahead to the graduation and realize that there will be a pall on those ceremonies.

And, at the root of it all, is a culture that so glorifies violence that we create people who can commit this sort of crime in the first place.