As a course requirement for Honors 161/162/163 Creating Sustainable Communities, honors students were assigned a group project paired with a non-profit in the SLO community. The goal of these projects was to enhance the lives of people in the community, whether that be environmentally, socially, physically, emotionally, etc. My group partnered with RISE, a local women's shelter that offers services to sexual assault survivors and their dependents. Our role with RISE was to create a social media campaign to help spread awareness of sexual assault and rape culture, and we were then paired with Jennifer Adams, the executive director at the SLO location. Ms. Adams granted us a decent amount of creative freedom with which social media platform, which message, and which audience we chose to involve ourselves in. However, she did encourage us to make our campaign targeted more toward men, who are the highest demographic of perpetrators. While a campaign focused more on the perpetrators rather than the victims would have been a direct call to action, we could not envision our audience to be positively receptive. Furthermore, survivors and perpetrators include men and women alike, so we could not bring ourselves to exclude the narratives of all survivors by only empathizing with one demographic and blaming another. As a result, we created our Instagram account called Build Up Cal Poly, where we intentionally left gender specific content out in order to welcome all survivors. We chose to reach out to Cal Poly students specifically to call all students to action to change the climate of our campus regarding the culture around intimacy and body objectification. Our content included tips on how to be an active up stander, information on verbal phrases that perpetuate rape culture, statistics on sexual assaults in America, and announcements/reminders about Sexual Assault Awareness Month. We also launched a week-long challenge similar to that of the ALS ice bucket challenge, where we encouraged clubs to participate in a way that symbolizes unity against sexual assault and behaviors that support such actions. Our challenge involved the yoga tree-pose, which is similar to a mountain shape and requires a strong foundation to stand up, just as our community needs to stand up against intimacy violence. While only a handful of clubs participated, our group concluded that we did spread our message to some Cal Poly students, which was our goal. With more publicity and development, and fewer road blocks, this campaign could have flourished more, but the experience was very rewarding.
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