The National Sexual Violence Resource Center announced the theme for the National Sexual Assault Awareness Campaign, Building Connected Communities, which focuses on addressing social and structural factors that impact the way people live, learn, work and play in order to prevent and end sexual violence.
Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) aims to raise public awareness about sexual violence and educate communities about how to prevent it. This year, NSVRC calls on movement leaders to take a Health Equity approach to ending violence, by addressing the social and structural determinants of health, like education, income, employment, community safety and social support in order to promote health and wellbeing.
For our purposes, we wish to situate the national campaign within our Transformative Justice and Feminist Framework of Growing Consent Culture by calling everyone in to grow a connected community. While the social and structural determinants of health are always considered in anti-violence and prevention work, at SAFE Center we understand that growing our relationships with each other is the first step in creating a more connected community. This shift allows us to be accountable to the ways in which public health approaches can medicalize and pathologize survivors and look towards a more grounded and relational understanding and practice.
For our Growing Connected Communities theme, our student graphic designer chose the might Aspen tree. They offer,
“The aspen tree is the largest organism on the planet in terms of mass. This is because an aspen is never a single tree; rather, it is part of a clonal community of many trees, all sharing a massive, sprawling root system underground. All the trees in the community share the exact same genetic material, and sprouts emerge from the roots to form new trees when older ones wither in a cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
The largest of these communities has existed as long as 14 thousand years, making it one of the oldest living collective organisms on earth. Ancient wisdom: the kind colonial knowledge cuts us off from. We forget. We forget how deep the roots reach, how far they span, the way thousands of trees become one. We are like this, too. We have always been like this.
A tree on one edge of the spread knows when one of its clones suffers, a hundred acres away. Empathy travels via mycelial networks. No matter the distance, the trees are part of each other, so intrinsically, deeply entwined that they can never be separated. We are like this, too: connected. Deep, ancient, one. Our collective liberation comes when we remember that we all come from the same tangle of roots. We are the same. We have always been the same.”
We look forward to connecting with you throughout this year’s programmatic offerings as we dream and root and grow together towards a future and community free of sexual violence.
Calendar of Events, including detailed descriptions:
Monday, April 1st: Sexual Assault Awareness Month Kick Off Event, A Fireside Chat: Gender, Race, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade with Dr. Ray Black, Dr. Caridad Souza, & Dr. Kwadwo, visiting scholar from Ghana. Light Snacks provided.
University Ballroom, 5 – 7 p.m.
Ticketing through RamEvents
Wednesday, April 3rd: CSU Students in collaboration with RamEvents are proud and excited to present A Conversation with Linda Sarsour, Palestinian American Activist and former Co-Chair of the Women’s March
Nii-cii-biicei’i , Never No Summer Ballroom, 6 p.m.
Ticketing through RamEvents: https://csutix.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=1424
Tuesday, April 9th: Survivor’s Speakers Bureau
There is immense power in storytelling. An important part of healing and activism for many survivors of interpersonal violence is to tell their stories in community for the purpose of being witnessed, heard, and validated. This can seem daunting at first, which is why we are offering a supportive, confidential workshop on trauma informed storytelling where survivors can learn the skills and practices of empowered story telling.
Completing this 2-hour orientation also opens the opportunity for survivors to share their stories in an official capacity on campus with the WGAC. Dinner Provided.
5:30 pm-7:30 p.m. email WGAC@colostate.edu for registration and location
Tuesday, April 16th: Secondary Survivors Workshop
This session delves into the impacts of trauma, looking at how it presents itself in both survivors and their supporters. Students are invited to share personal experiences in being secondary survivors and how trauma has affected their friends or loved ones. Furthermore, we will explore coping techniques beneficial for both survivors and secondary survivors alike.
3:30 p.m. -4:45 p.m., email WGAC@colostate.edu for registration and location
Thursday April 18th Love Women of Color: Centering Empowerment Through Art
Women of Color are more than their trauma. Join us in centering empowerment and resilience through creative processes in this silk screening workshop. T-shirts for silk screening provided. In partnership with El Centro, APACC, NACC, Pride, B/AACC
6:00- 7:30 p.m., El Centro
Saturday, April 27th: Bike Back the Night
Come Ride and be in community with us in recognition of Sexual Assault Awareness Month 2024. We will meet in the Lory Student Center Plaza and ride a designated route to City Park, ending with a resource fair and vendors.
Tuesday, April 30th: Take Back the Night: Light in the Dark/ Luz En Lo Oscuro
This year, Take Back the Night will be a space where writing, ritual, and artistic creative expression empowers survivors to be the light in the dark, both in their own lives and the world. And, for the first time, we plan to use Take Back the Night to honor survivors who will be graduating this spring 2024 semester.
RSVP is required
Lory Student Center Ballrooms C and D, 7- 8:30 p.m.
Ask An Advocate: The Clothesline Project
Throughout April, Ask An Advocate will focus on creating t-shirts for our new installment of The Clothesline Project, which is a visual display of t-shirts in different colors with graphic messages and illustrations, each of which represents the experience of a survivor or someone who lost their life to interpersonal violence.
Each t-shirt color represents a different type of violence.
The purpose of the Clothesline Project is to increase awareness of the impact of interpersonal violence, to celebrate strength and resiliency and to provide a means to break through the silence that often surrounds interpersonal violence. Shirts and fabric paints provided, finished projects will be displayed during Take Back the Night.
Visit Us During these times:
Monday April 1, 2-3pm, Student Disability Center, LSC Office
Tuesday April 2, 2-3:30pm, WGAC LSC Office
Thursday April 4, 1-2pm, El Centro
Monday April 8, 2-3pm, Adult Learner Veteran Services
Tuesday April 9, 2-3:30pm, Native American Cultural Center
Thursday April 11, Asian Pacific American Cultural Center
Thursday April 11, 2-3pm, Black/African American Cultural Center
Friday April 12, 10-11am, Pride Resource Center
The theme for this year’s TBTN is ‘a light in the dark /Luz En Lo Oscuro’, inspired by the book by Chicana Feminist Gloria Anzaldúa.
This book takes a deep look into Anzaldua’s creative and spiritual processes in which she develops her aesthetics and theories on transformation that are grounded in interconnectedness.
She was especially focused on exploring knowledge production that is shaped through social justice, identity (trans)formation, and healing. This book is unique in the ways that Anzaldua intentionally sought to have the words move inside the reader’s bodies, transforming them.
A symbol of this transformation is Anzaldua’s reclaimed conceptualization of Coyolxauhqui, which was her first “light in the dark”. The story of Coyolxauhqui represents a complex holism in both the acknowledgment of painful fragmentation and the promise of transformative healing.
From this story, Anzaldua created the ‘coyolxauhqui’ imperative’, which is a complex healing process and a theory of writing that she described as “both the process of emotional psychical dismemberment, splitting body/ mind /spirit /soul, and the creative work of putting all the pieces together in a new form, a partially unconscious work done in the night by the light of the moon, a labor of re visioning and re membering.” Appearing in every chapter, she suggests Coyolxauhqui hovers over Light in the Dark, “Ella es la luna and she lights the darkness.”
Interweaving the personal with the collective, Anzaldúa uses these concepts to bridge the historical moment with recurring political aesthetic issues, such as U.S. colonialism, nationalism, complicity, cultural trauma, racism, sexism, and other forms of systemic oppression. Throughout, she valorizes subaltern forms and methods of knowing, being, and creating that have been marginalized by Western thought, and theorizes her writing process as a fully embodied artistic and political practice.
With this in mind, we seek to apply the theories gifted to us by Gloria Anzaldúa to cast a light on the ways in which survivors have a vast array of differing lived experiences that are layered inside Western colonial systems that create barriers to healing, justice, and (re)connection.
These experiences, always political, are kept in the dark. While survivors are cast out as broken.
Reflecting on Anzaldua’s practices of healing, we know that survivors of oppressive systems and rape culture are not broken, rather, we are called to embark on a complex process of falling apart to come back together in a new form, a light in the dark.
This year, Take Back the Night will be a space where writing, ritual, and artistic creative expression empowers survivors to be the light in the dark, both in their own lives and the world. And, for the first time, we plan to use Take Back the Night to honor survivors who will be graduating this spring 2024 semester.
We are incorporating our chosen symbol, the Lunamoth, as a nod to Anzaldua’s reflections on the moon and Coyolxauhqui as Luna moths use the moon and stars to orientate, always adjusting their flying tracks to keep the light source at a constant angle to the eye. Because of the ways they use moon and star light in the darkness of the night, the luna moth is seen as a symbol of spiritual transformation, of heightened awareness, and a striving towards truth and searching for the light.
Luna moths signify rebirth, renewal, regeneration, and new beginnings.
They represent perseverance,vulnerability, and letting go.
We felt that the luna moth is a beautiful representation of what it means to live as a survivor.
A reminder that through the dark times, there is always light guiding the way to the next phase of self, spirit, and life in spite of trauma and violence.
A Reminder that reorientation and starting over as many times as needed is what allows us to take flight.
A reminder that as you leave here from this place, endings always bring new beginnings and a chance to lay down all the things you’ve been carrying.
“Let us be the healing of the wound.” Gloria E. Anzaldua
In collaboration with the Native American Cultural Center, we invite members of the campus and Fort Collins community to learn more about the unique impact that sexual violence has in Native communities through a beading project focused on awareness and healing.
Specifically, we call on our community to join us in creating red dress earrings for an exhibition that will highlight the experiences of Indigenous Peoples in the context of sexual violence.
This is a community based project in which we are inviting members of the campus community to help us in creating 1-2 pairs of earrings for an exhibition during Take Back the Night and the week leading up to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Day on May 5th.
Each pair of earrings takes around 300 beads to create and will represent 1 Missing Murdered Indigenous Person.
This will be a continuous project to bring awareness to the ongoing reality that Indigenous people face. We are hoping by raising awareness on our campus it will also create discussion around the erasure of Indigenous people from conversations about ending sexual violence.
This project is influenced by similar projects such as “Lil Red Dress Project” & “The Redress Project”. The red dress has become a symbol for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women, originating with artist Jaime Black. We will be using materials that the Lil Red Dress Project has made available.
Beadwork is considered a sacred and healing practice across many tribes and can be regarded as good medicine. Due to the success of our last beading event for Relationship Violence Awareness Month, WGAC & NACC wanted to make an event that could be highlighted during Sexual Assault Awareness Month as well as MMIP Awareness Day.
We need people to help make 50 pairs of earrings to display in a walk through exhibition, which will include contextual information and stories of missing persons.
Each pair will represent a Missing Murdered Indigenous Person.
The intention is to make this a long-term program in which, every year, we add to the collection of earrings.
For the inception year, the exhibition will be displayed at Take Back the Night and will be displayed the week before MMIP Awareness Day on May 5th, location TBD.
To join this effort, please email us at WGAC@colostate.edu
