Green Dot Week at Sinclair is a series of events happening from Oct. 16-19 to raise awareness of personal power based violence on campus.
Kates Brommeland from Student and Community Engagement and Mat Massie coordinate the presence of Green Dot at Sinclair, and will host the three events that will happen during the week.
The week focuses on building as much awareness as possible. The program itself focuses more on training and prevention.
Green Dot is a nationally recognized bystander intervention training program to reduce and end power based violence not only on college campus but in K-12 schools.
“The Air Force has even adopted Green Dot as their prevention program,” Brommeland said.
Personal power based violence can be defined as types of violence that use the assertion of power. That covers bullying, sexual assault, domestic violence, abuse and other related types of violence.
The program equips students and faculty with tools and knowledge to say or do something if they see something happening.
“Green Dot’s motto is ‘no one has to do everything but everyone has to do something,” Brommeland said.
Green Dot week teaches the Green Dot three D’s: direct distract and delegate, as well as what the program calls proactive green dots.
The Green Dot three D’s are for when you see something happening. To directly intervene, to distract or to call someone else to help which would be delegate.
Proactive green dots are really what Green Dot week focuses on. They build awareness and get people involved. Something as simple as wearing a Green Dot button on your backpack and answering questions people may ask or putting a Green Dot magnet on you locker would be a proactive green dot.
Student and Community Engagement run a four hour intervention training session for Green Dot. The training goes over everything about Green Dot and goes through scenarios for intervening.
Interested students can contact the Student and Community Engagement office and after the training can be invited to help with the next Green Dot Week events in the Spring of 2018.
“It’s for someone who really really wants to be involved,” said Brommeland. “It’s a way for them to get involved as bystander trainer.”
While this Fall is the first launching of a full year for Green Dot at Sinclair, the program had a soft launch back in Spring of 2017. Brommeland and Student and Community engagement hope to raise awareness and get more people involved with the program as it grows.
Oct. 18 will be What is Your Green Dot? The event will be an overview of all the information including the Green Dot 3 D’s. It will be held in the Building 8 stage area from 11-12 a.m.
Oct. 17 from 11:00 a.m. -12:00 p.m. is Green Dot Plinko, to raise awareness at the Tartan Marketplace. Plinko is a pricing game most popular on the Price is Right.
The week will end on Oct. 19 with Share a Green Dot at 11:30 a.m. on the 3rd floor of Building 11.
At Share a Green Dot, participants will write down a green dot moment on a little piece of paper. This could be many things including a time you intervened. The green dots will then be collected and used for a bulletin board campaign.
The goal of the campaign as well as everything else included during Green Dot Week is to build awareness. The campaign should last until the end of November.
Cerridwyn Kuykendall
Reporter