Foundational Education offers people foundational ways to exist in community, like ensuring consensual encounters, trauma-informed ways of being, and violence prevention strategies. SAFE Center’s educational programs and presentations are often the first place Freshman students encounter these topics, and we believe this education sets the stage for future success.

At SAFE Center, our work is focused on dismantling rape culture and ending interpersonal violence, thus growing a culture of consent and creating a campus (and world) where all people thrive. 

At SAFE Center, our Foundational Education framework is based on the following principles:

• Empowerment: Students are encouraged to be active participants in their learning and development, as well as their choice to offer consent in any encounter.
• Community building: Students work together to create a supportive and welcoming learning environment.
• Respect for difference: Students’ unique personal identities, experiences, and perspectives are valued and affirmed.
• Challenging traditional assumptions: Students are invited to engage and push back on the status quo to better understand themselves and the world around them.

Why Foundational Education?

Simply put, Prevention Education is Foundational Education.

Prevention education refers to comprehensive education that is focused on addressing the root causes of interpersonal violence such as sexual assault, relationship violence, and stalking. Prevention strategies address the ways individual relationships, communities, and societal factors influence the occurrence of harm impact and aim to prevent violence before it occurs.

There are many approaches to prevention education. While many organizations take up a Public Health model, SAFE Center is sensitive to the ways that the medical model historically and currently individualizes, pathologizes, and depoliticizes the impacts of sexual violence. We instead employ trauma informed programming, often incorporating elements of Transformative Justice and Healing Justice, to ensure our educational efforts are survivor centered and serve the purposes of community healing.