College students’ mental health and well being in a time of a pandemic and their safety when new rules on sexual assault investigations kick in on Aug. 14 were the main issues discussed on Wednesday at the annual EVERFI Campus Prevention Network Summit.
This year, the conference is virtual because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, more than 800 higher education leaders and organizations are expected to participate in the two-day event during which health and safety issues on university campuses will be analyzed.
On Wednesday, Tom Davidson, founder and CEO of EVERFI, opened the summit by addressing the ongoing racial justice protests across the country following the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in policy custody in Minneapolis last week.
“We know we are not okay and we know that this affects many of us in a very different way than others, we want to give voice to that at this time,” he said. “EVERFI was created to go after many of these tough challenges that we will talk about not just in the news and not just at dinner tables tonight but also at this conference in the coming days.”
Davidson said that “while our hearts hurt, we know that this conversation and the conversations that follow are going to allow us to do this important work even better in the future.”
In the keynote address, human rights activist and author of Know My Name: A Memoir, Chanel Miller, discussed her experience with sexual assault.
She said when her sexual assault statement went viral, she was approached by the media to tell her story immediately as it was still relevant in the news cycle. At the time, she wasn’t ready to talk about it, but three years later she did.
