TOPEKA — The Kansas Department of Health and Environment awarded a grant to the Sexual Assault Prevention and Education Program at the University of Kansas for a new prevention initiative. 

The Cultivating Protective Communities program will extend beyond just KU, reaching communities across Kansas to create more protective environments against sexual assault using environmental design and strategic prevention. 

“When we’re moving to environmental and situational prevention, we’re saying instead of putting the pressure on people needing to be aware of their surroundings, how can we make the surroundings aware of them,” said SAPEC prevention coordinator Taylor Jones. “That means looking at a space and being able to see what aspects of that environment provide more vulnerable areas.”

With the help from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Rape Prevention and Education grant administered by KDHE, SAPEC will launch the new initiative with funding lasting through 2029, according to a news release from KDHE.

Along with being a prevention coordinator, Jones will serve as the program facilitator for Cultivating Protective Communities. She will oversee communication and resources for the program’s implementation sites across the state.

“They’ll have access to the funds necessary to get education or training around violence prevention through environmental design,” Jones said. “Whether that is a bar in town, their local shelter or local mental health center, they get to choose that location and I get to support them as well as helping train that site so that the site feels good about what they’re doing.”

Each site’s implementation team will work with community members on “reducing opportunities to engage in harm-causing behavior and increasing the desirability of engaging in protective behaviors,” according to the news release.

One implementation site, Jana’s Campaign, a Hays-based nonprofit dedicated to educating and preventing gender and relationship violence. The collaboration will allow Jana’s Campaign to expand beyond education alone, as well as increase prevention measures.

“Through that funding we can have two sites for implementation,” said Kaiti Blackburn, executive director of Jana’s Campaign. “We’ve pulled a committee together and over the next couple years our goal is to have one site on the Fort Hays (State University) campus and then one site in the Ellis County community.”

Blackburn said the ultimate goal stays the same: focusing on education in order to prevent these situations from happening. 

“Through this project and through Jana’s Campaign in general, our ultimate goal is to stop violence before it starts,” Blackburn said. “So if we can reduce the instances of dating violence, domestic violence, sexual violence and/or stalking, that’s our goal so we can live in a community where healthy and safe relationships are more of the norm.”

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

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