Members of the UW-Madison student organization Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment are planning to add speaker events and new programs through funds allocated by the Student Services Finance Committee.
PAVE members work to end all forms of sexual assault, dating and domestic violence and stalking on campus through primary prevention, and seek to change the public’s attitudes and behaviors surrounding these issues through education and activism.
SSFC heard a presentation from PAVE on Oct. 22, where the group originally asked for an $8,000 increase for their 2016-’17 budget to send speakers to conferences and increase employee salaries.
SSFC members voted Monday to grant PAVE with $86,657.50 for the next fiscal year, part of which PAVE will devote toward speakers on domestic violence, sexual assault, LGBTQ+ advocacy, multicultural awareness and a training against stalking.
“[The speakers] will all strengthen our outreach into programming that we haven’t done before, reaching out to parts of communities that experience sexual violence in different ways, and need to give access to the conversations that PAVE are having,” PAVE Chair Sophie Nielsen said.
Originally, PAVE members requested to bring 10 members to a National Association of Student Personnel conference next school year, which SSFC members debated Monday, and eventually decreased to six members.
“I was overall pleased with the decision, but I was unhappy with the NASPA committee budget change because we thought we created a very strong proposal for the budget plan,” Nielsen said. “Regardless, we plan to use it as best as possible.”
Before settling on sending six members, some SSFC members suggested PAVE send four members to the NASPA conference, which Nielsen said she was not happy with.
“We knew the request to have 10 people go to a conference was going to be the main point of fight, because otherwise, we wrote a very tight budget,” Nielsen said. “We worked really hard on that, but I knew there was going to be some pushback from some of the more fiscally conservative folks on [SSFC members].”
Nielsen said in the future she hopes to get a minimum of eight members to attend conferences.
