Augustana College Gets $298,827 Grant for Sexual Violence Prevention and Education, Hires New Director
Augustana College, Rock Island, has received a $298,827 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and has hired a new program director for sexual violence prevention and education — Zachary Draves.
Zachary Draves is new program director for sexual violence prevention and education.
In this role, Draves will work with others from across campus to coordinate and enhance Augustana’s response to sexual violence, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking. The grant period covers three years.
“The DOJ requires that campuses who are funded with a grant develop and implement targeted and campus-wide initiatives for students, faculty, staff and administration to address sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking,” Draves said in a Tuesday release from the college.
He aims to enhance mandatory prevention and education programs for all incoming students, and promote sexual violence prevention strategies and bystander intervention programs.
As a requirement of the grant, Draves must develop and lead a Coordinated Community Response Team of campus and community stakeholders to focus on prevention efforts. And he will ensure that victim services, law enforcement and student conduct experts are involved, too.
Augustana College received a U.S. Department of Justice grant to launch the new program director job.
Last year, Draves received his master’s in social work degree from Aurora University outside Chicago and has experience working as a domestic violence prevention educator and anti-bullying educator.
According to a 2016 national survey of 25,000 U.S. college and university students, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 14 men experienced sexual assault while in college.
For female bisexual and transgender students, victimization rates were even higher. More than 1 in 4 of transgender students and more than 1 in 3 of bisexual students experienced sexual assault while in college.
Of the 2,380 total students who said they experienced rape during college, only 7 percent reported the incident to school authorities, according to the January 2017 report, released by The White House.
In 2014, then-President Obama and Vice President Biden created the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.
The Task Force was created to:
- Raise awareness of the frequency in which sexual assault occurs at all school levels
- Let survivors of sexual assault know that they are not alone and that there are resources to help
- Ensure that colleges and universities across the country know how to develop a comprehensive plan to keep students safe from sexual assault
- Help schools live up to their obligations under Title IX
Taking on an entirely new position at Augustana requires building it from the ground up. For Draves, that’s exciting.
“What inspired me to take this position at Augie, beyond work and education, was my deep commitment to social justice,” he said in the release.
“My passion for social justice goes back as far as I can remember,” Draves said. “My deep affinity for college campuses really stems from the
As a requirement of the grant, Draves must develop and lead a team of campus and community stakeholders to focus on prevention efforts.
fact that campuses were very much the epicenter of many of the prominent social movements in history, from the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s-1980s, to the present-day organizing around issues such as campus sexual assault.
“The spirit of young people coming together to effect positive change is where I want to be,” he said. “This is a perfect opportunity to be able to understand and come together and realize that campus sexual assault is part of this broader social-justice movement.
“I want to be where young people are, creating change and that is a college campus,” he said. “Augie has a rich history and a rich tradition of doing so. Currently, at the moment, there is a sense of urgency among the students to create changes on campus – particularly around issues of campus sexual assault.”
One priority Draves has is to look at where students are at and how they’re feeling, he said in a college video on the new position.
“It’s a matter of building that trust, building that rapport,” he said. “What I’m hoping to do is a build a bridge between the students and the administration, and to let the students know that we want to work with them. We don’t want to create this distance between students and the administration. We want to create programs and initiatives that really center the students and also have student involvement.”
“I get that feeling of urgency by students and my colleagues as well, and I foresee a lot of good happening in the near future,” Draves said.
After a national search, the college welcomed him to the campus community in early March.
