SUNY Oswego recently earned a SUNY’s Got Your Grant award, including $2,019 to put toward prevention programming, in the 2019 contest for highest number of points earned for a state-operated campus in promoting the SUNY's Got Your Back program.
SUNY’s Got Your Back is a statewide project where SUNY students, faculty, staff and community members create comfort kits for victims and survivors of violence. The program also teaches methods of better preventing and responding to violence, with the goal of building a New York where these bags are no longer needed.
“SUNY’s Got Your Back is a university-wide initiative where we have assembled well over 100,000 comfort bags and educated countless students since the campaign began in April 2016,” said Joseph Storch, associate counsel and principal investigator of the SUNY’s Got Your Back program, as well as a 2002 SUNY Oswego graduate.
The contest measured social media promotion of the activities and programs and factored in the percentage of enrollment.
“Oswego has been a leader in not only assembling bags but in educating thousands of students so we can prevent these crimes before they occur,” Storch said. “We offer our congratulations to President Deborah F. Stanley, Title IX Coordinator Lisa Evaneski, Vice President Jerri Howland and all the SUNY Oswego students, faculty and staff who have been such great leaders and partners in this initiative.”
SUNY Oswego’s March 5, 2019 event, featuring renowned DJ and activist Zeke Thomas, was a resounding success, thanks to robust support from campus, Evaneski said.
“The award says a lot about how much our college community cares about these kinds of important causes,” Evaneski noted. “The students and student organizations really came out in full force, and we had so much support from faculty, staff, the administration and the community.”
The SUNY Impact foundation funded the grants to campuses.
Oswego’s 2020 SUNY’s Got Your Back event will take place in October. For more information on getting involved with this event and related prevention programs, email Evaneski at lisa.evaneski@oswego.edu.
