Men As Peacemakers
Report date
December 2021
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Within complex institutions, the support of institutional partners is vital to the success of a culture changing sexual violence prevention project like BEST. MAP recognizes that community-connectedness (the nature and quality of engagement among community members) is not only a primary protective factor against harm and violence, but also critical to the long-term change-making process that is required for preventing sexual violence on campus. BEST’s primary innovation is engaging students in shaping their environments in ways that reflect their interconnected responsibility to one another–and cultivating community connectedness at the institutional level is critical to the overall success of such an effort. Therefore, during this grant term, MAP spent significant time cultivating relationship with institutional partners who are already embedded within the campus community. Institutional partnerships with the Aurora Center, U of M Research Collaborative, Greek Life, and emerging campus partners enabled MAP to gain insight into the existing culture and climate, entry points with the highest potential for transformation, barriers to change,and needs specific to each campus.
While institutional partnerships are critical to the success of BEST, students are often the driving force for institutional change. MAP provides the training and skills needed to increase student capacity to shape their own environments. Whereas institutional partners may feel pressure in their decision-making process to avoid immediate acknowledgement of sexual violence and party culture realities on campus, students are not inhibited by these same considerations. Rather, they are eager to use their influence to learn, generate ideas, and test solutions to create change. For students, it makes sense to create a party culture rooted in shared values of mutual respect and thriving. MAP has refined an engagement tool that engages and cultivates student leaders. The BEST Party Model is a community driven environment-shaping program designed to equip students as change-makers within high-risk campus social settings. Remarkably, even during the pandemic, MAP was able to authentically engage students. With each cohort, more opportunities for connection and impact emerged–including deepening capacity with Aurora Center and Greek Life leaders to expand the BEST project.
No single curriculum, no one partnership, is sufficient to address the layers of complexity and competing priorities in a campus community. During this grant, MAP was intentional in cultivating trust and approaching the U of M and emerging campuses from a stance of curiosity, shared problem solving, adaptability, and responsiveness. We listened to identify “open doors” with the highest potential for impact, and created/implemented/tested a set of resources that met specific community needs. These informed our adaptable BEST Comprehensive Approach including:
-BEST Party Model Curriculum
-Two animated videos highlighting and explaining BEST
-BEST Campus Prevention Institute – a 5-part virtual series that combines live presentations, interviews, and panel discussions with opportunities to interact with the content.
-BEST Alternative Response Project – Designed with feedback from survivors and service providers to enhance the campus adjudication process, this project aims to help students who have caused harm rejoin the campus community with accountability.
-BEST Technical Assistance and Support for Prevention Strategies.
-BEST Party Model Curriculum
-Two animated videos highlighting and explaining BEST
-BEST Campus Prevention Institute – a 5-part virtual series that combines live presentations, interviews, and panel discussions with opportunities to interact with the content.
-BEST Alternative Response Project – Designed with feedback from survivors and service providers to enhance the campus adjudication process, this project aims to help students who have caused harm rejoin the campus community with accountability.
-BEST Technical Assistance and Support for Prevention Strategies.
Key lessons learned
Implementing BEST is not a linear process. Even when invited in by influential partners, resistance to the offerings of an outside organization is predictable. Community-level prevention aims to change culture, environment, policy, and practice to create safer communities. It requires refocusing capacity/resources and acknowledging the current problems in ways that are often challenging for campus decision makers.
During this grant, MAP learned valuable lessons about the role we play in holding “grey area” where differing interests and perspectives come together. Navigating grey area can be challenging, but it is a crucial part of what an outside organization can do to open opportunities for transformation. It involves valuing relationships and differing perspectives while seeing the hidden architecture of a campus, the way power moves, and where the path forward might lie. At times, we experienced waves of momentum, only to have them derailed. Through these disappointments, we grew our capacity to navigate the grey areas and were able to learn and adjust and move forward with successful student engagement efforts and valuable opportunities to institutionalize BEST at UofM.
During this grant, MAP learned valuable lessons about the role we play in holding “grey area” where differing interests and perspectives come together. Navigating grey area can be challenging, but it is a crucial part of what an outside organization can do to open opportunities for transformation. It involves valuing relationships and differing perspectives while seeing the hidden architecture of a campus, the way power moves, and where the path forward might lie. At times, we experienced waves of momentum, only to have them derailed. Through these disappointments, we grew our capacity to navigate the grey areas and were able to learn and adjust and move forward with successful student engagement efforts and valuable opportunities to institutionalize BEST at UofM.
Prevention strategies that change culture are long term processes. As a result, it takes more than participant survey data to adequately demonstrate impact. Surveys do not capture the community level impacts of cross campus partnerships, organic changes in party culture, or increases in community-connectedness that resulted from persistent, committed engagement between MAP and students during the pandemic, when other student programs were halted.
While MAP collected lots of data for BEST during the grant period (surveys provided positive results), our primary interest was in cultivating relationships with students and campus partners in order to take tangible steps towards lasting institutional change. MAP is working with evaluation experts at Department of Health to capture the impact of BEST in ways that support decision makers with information–beyond survey data–to invest in a deep, cultural transformation process. Indeed, the demonstration of impact is in the community’s stories–and creating conditions where everyday stories are shared regularly and valued as essential data to decision makers.
This is part of the culture shift/innovation that BEST aims to help power.
While MAP collected lots of data for BEST during the grant period (surveys provided positive results), our primary interest was in cultivating relationships with students and campus partners in order to take tangible steps towards lasting institutional change. MAP is working with evaluation experts at Department of Health to capture the impact of BEST in ways that support decision makers with information–beyond survey data–to invest in a deep, cultural transformation process. Indeed, the demonstration of impact is in the community’s stories–and creating conditions where everyday stories are shared regularly and valued as essential data to decision makers.
This is part of the culture shift/innovation that BEST aims to help power.
Comprehensive strategies to address root causes of SV naturally encounter barriers as institutional players grapple with what is required. We experienced barriers in this grant, but we learned that as barriers emerged, it was possible to more clearly see and navigate according to the “open doors” that existed. Among many lessons about open doors, student-driven grassroots movement was the most immediate and powerful door that opened. Students have a vested interest–and unique ability–in taking control of their own campus experience, shaping physical environments and influencing party culture, with or without the blessing of leadership. It was their energy that made other big leaps forward possible. Working with shared resources and shared ownership was the next most powerful door. Campuses could mobilize more energy and possibility when they were owners in the process of creation. MAP made a purposeful pivot from providing programming to building capacity. A third “open door” emerged from multiple campus requests to enhance the campus adjudication process, with aims to help students who have caused harm learn about the impact of their choices and their role in addressing SV.
Reflections on the community innovation process
The “Community Processes” part of the diagram was the most important–Specifically learning what the “inclusive” “collaborative” and “resourceful” pieces mean in a complex campus environment. A project like this cannot succeed without highly functional relationships with students and a variety of campus partners. Through trial and error we learned about the unique importance of shared ownership in our campus relationships. We came to understand that our goal is to build capacity and possibility on campuses–and the more students and partners feel shared ownership in what is created, the better. This is a central principle of how we are working with our campus partners now–whether it’s training the Aurora Center to host and facilitate the BEST program on their own, or the relationship and shared strategy, capacity building, and decision making we build into our new campus partnerships.
Progress toward an innovation
This grant helped us learn, evolve, and develop the capacity needed to support campuses with openness to transformative, long term community engagement approaches to sexual violence prevention. The biggest progress we made was in our capacity and understanding of relationship building, navigating “grey space,” sharing ownership, creating conditions for rhizomatic student leadership, and more impactfully sharing stories in campus environments. These learning are already supporting leaps forward in our ongoing campus work. This grant also allowed us to finalize a student generated curriculum and training program, develop a pilot BEST Alternative Response project, develop animations and media that help build understanding and capacity for the BEST approach, initiate an innovative institute connecting multiple campuses through community building and sexual violence prevention work, and engage community partners, funders, and campuses in transformational conversation about the power and value of relationship, stories, and their relationship to standard ways of measuring effectiveness. We now have powerful experiences, concrete resources, and clarity about our role and strategy.
What it will take to reach an innovation?
NA
What's next?
MAP has more momentum than we have staff as we end this grant period. We will be training the Aurora Center staff and students to coordinate and facilitate the BEST Project Internally at the University of Minnesota. This is the type of capacity building we hope for on campuses. Partners at the University of Minnesota are also central to our online Institute which will be released in early 2022–and will engage campuses in building capacity for implementing BEST (or projects like it) on their campuses. We anticipate this will add multiple campus partners to our shared prevention innovation community. Additionally, we are already committed to working with the College of St. Benedict/Saint John’s University, the University of Minnesota-Duluth, and the College of St. Scholastica to implement all or parts of the BEST strategy. We feel well positioned to utilize the lessons and successes of this project to make culture changing sexual violence prevention strategies a norm on college campuses across the state–and beyond.
If you could do it all over again...
Within massive institutions it is vital to contextualize successes and failures. The original grant’s objectives were lofty. As an outside organization, though, there was advantage in holding ourselves to different goals/timelines than amazing partners negotiating the pressures of their siloed positions within campus. Our original plans were derailed early in the grant, but we still made significant leaps–and figured out critical components of our innovation because we kept navigating a path toward lofty goals. Additionally, it is important to remember that admin/faculty is only part of the whole campus community. Direct engagement and cultivation of student leadership powered much success, often despite obstacles that had to be navigated within the campus’s institutional structure. There is no substitute for the leadership of those most impacted. This project was full of successes and barriers, but we will remember that when you keep moving at the speed of relationship the pathways forward emerge. In large part, the capacity to persistently move at the speed of relationship, at all levels–with all our might–is the heart of the innovation BEST brings to SV prevention.
One last thought
We would greatly appreciate continued thought partnership.