Mission
The mission of the United States Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women’s (OVW) Campus Program is to develop effective culturally-relevant campus-based programming that builds upon strong campus and community partnerships with the goals of strengthening services for victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking and promoting multifaceted prevention strategies within the campus community.
To that end, the Campus Program provides comprehensive, responsive, and well-informed technical assistance to campus grantees and other colleges and universities to ensure survivor-centered responses are holistic while holding offenders accountable.
Campus Grant
OVW also administers a Technical Assistance Program to provide OVW grantees with the training, expertise, and problem-solving strategies they need to meet the challenges of addressing sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking. OVW’s technical assistance projects offer in-person and online educational opportunities, peer-to-peer consultations, site visits and tailored assistance for OVW grantees and potential grantees. In more limited circumstances, OVW’s technical assistance projects offer technical assistance to a small number of pilot sites through demonstration initiatives or for assessments of newly developed training curricula or tools.
Since 2010, Mississippi Coalition Against Sexual Assault (MCASA) has been a technical assistance provider to campuses that are recipients of the OVW “Grant to Reduce Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking on Campus.”
MSCASA also provides training and technical assistance to institutions of higher education on developing effective victim services and advocacy programs for college students including capacity building, referral processes, collaborative victim service models with local victim services organizations and training for campus advocates.
For additional information, contact Frances Horton-White fwhite@mscasa.org.
Campus Specific Webinars
Scoring a Hat Trick: Three Ways to Minimize Your Partnership with Athletics
Presenter: Darcie Folsom, Connecticut College in collaboration with Green Dot
Making the team can be tough. In this session, we will explore “preseason conditioning” to get you ready to take the ice with strategies to create a solid foundation for a working partnership with Athletics. With “teamwork” your prevention work can be enhanced and positively impact campus culture while empowering athletes to see themselves as part of the solution.
Building Cultural Competence in Your Campus Program
Presenter: Farah Tanis and Sherine Powerful, Black Women’s Blueprint
This webinar is intended to assist with building the capacity of colleges and universities to center the identities and lived experiences of a variety of student groups in program delivery and the subsequent assessment of program compatibility and utilization.
Our aim is for each campus to be equipped to respond to the impact of relevant, population-specific, and intersectional factors like geography, transition, and history in addition to interpersonal, social, and cultural realities and beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality, among others, that can function both as challenges or assets in prevention and intervention initiatives for students.
Discussion in Communities
Presenter: Rebecca Balog, Women of Color Network, Inc. in collaboration with University of Colorado Denver Center on Domestic Violence
During “A Discussion on Communities”, we will discuss ways we can better identify communities in need, how to build better relationships, and what our barriers in reaching them are. People don’t come with barriers the way institutions and organizations do. Most services and programs have some components set up to deal with community-specific barriers but we have to shift our thinking from perceived “deficits” and turn the lens inward on overall programming and craft services that truly serve the full spectrum of needs of people in our constituencies, authentically.