The student body was notified on Sept. 12 of a $300,000 grant recently awarded to St. Bonaventure for the purpose of improving sexual assault resources on campus.
Nichole Gonzalez, the executive director for Residential Living and Conduct on campus, played an instrumental role in the application for the grant and the planning for the utilization of the resulting funds.
“Late last fall, the university contracted with a grant-writing agency to do lots of different grants, not just this one,” Gonzalez said. “The first grant they made us aware of was this grant.”
The grant agency the university worked with is McAllister and Quinn. They are aiding Bona’s in applying for various other grants as well.
“We agreed as an institution that we were going to go forward with applying for the grant,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez said applying for the grant was a lot of work, and there was a short period of time for the university to get the necessary information together for the application. There were several steps that had to be taken in the process, including a collection of webinars that had to be completed and a declaration of what the funds would be used for.
“There is an information packet about the things you would have to do with the grant money, things you would have to include in your grant application and then there is a really short time, a month and a half or two months, that we had to prepare all of this information and you don’t actually get all of that time to do that because you have to have it signed off on and do all of these other things,” said Gonzalez.
Gonzalez continued that a grant writer from McAllister and Quinn lead in helping gather the appropriate information and packaging it the right way and that she was responsible for making sure the school got the information and the program pieces that they wanted to do here at St. Bonaventure.
The grant money will be given to the university over the course of three years. Gonzalez said she believes the money is awarded in October, but she is unsure as to whether the university has been informed of that yet.
“The general idea of what we are looking at is like October through September is the grant year,” Gonzalez said. “What it is going to be used for is to provide a part-time person that will be coming here from the Cattaraugus County Community Action, so there will be a victim advocate on campus and they will be a confidential resource, so they don’t work for the university necessarily.”
The grant money will be paying for the advocate’s part-time salary and they would be working for the CCCA, but will be working at Bona’s.
“So, we will have a confidential resource, a confidential victim advocate on campus, 20 hours per week, and also available to respond to incidents, different crisis situations for sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence and stalking,” Gonzalez said.
The four stated issues of sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking that the victim advocate will be working with students on are the primary issues the grant tries to address through the establishment of certain services and programs.
“The other thing it would pay for is a program director, a new full-time person that over the course of three years will be doing program coordination,” said Gonzalez.
Peer education groups will be set up by those involved in this process, including the program director, to inform students of the four key issues this grant is dedicated to.
“We will also be focusing efforts on programming and education and response, specifically for LGBTQ+ populations,” Gonzalez said. “We are aiming to better educate the campus community on issues that the LGBTQ+ community faces that are different when it comes to sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence and stalking. [We also want] to provide more education to first responders and better resources for their communities.”
If a student would like to get in contact with someone to access these resources, there are two people Gonzalez said students should be directed to. The new full-time project director, who will be under Student Affairs and likely located on the second floor of the Reilly Center, is one such person. The second would be the part-time victim advocate from the CCCA that will probably be located in the Wellness Center, said Gonzalez.
A joint committee will be partnering with the New York state police, the sheriff’s department, Southern Tier Healthcare, which runs the sexual assault forensic examiner unit at the hospital and CCCA. They will also be partnering with others, including athletics, faculty, staff and student representatives.
“Those were all things that we needed to determine before when we were writing the grant application,” said Gonzalez. “These are the people that we are going to be tapping into and these are the people that are going to be on a joint committee that will be responsible for monitoring and establishing this program, hiring the full-time person and all other things related to distribution of grant funds.”
There are three things with this grant that Gonzalez said she was especially excited for.
“[I am excited for] the addition of staff, the addition of a full-time person that is going to be, at least for these three years, dedicated to programing and prevention and a confidential resource on campus dedicated to providing help and assistance to our students that has no obligation for reporting,” Gonzalez said. “The other thing I am most excited about that is going to be a change would be getting a peer educator group together.”
Gonzalez said that there are very few on campus who have taught these issues, and that they are all staff. She would like to see this change.
“There’s such a better way to get this information out there and it’s really through students, it’s through peer education,” Gonzalez said. “I think it gives our students a lot of great leadership opportunities as well, because I think students are passionate about these issues and I think students are really going to be able to advance these conversations much better than staff people can.”
Gonzalez said she is also looking forward to seeing the community being educated about LGBTQ+ issues as they relate to sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence and stalking. She also is excited to see resources provided to the LGBTQ+ community on St. Bonaventure campus.
“We’ve applied for this grant two times in the past, so I can’t even tell you how excited I am that we got it this time,” Gonzalez said. “I think that it is going to be huge for our campus and I am excited about the direction we are going to go and I am excited to get things started.”
By Landon Allison, Staff Writer
allisolj17@bonaventure.edu
