Programming
A critical part of Laurier's commitment working towards the elimination of gendered and sexual violence is to make resources available to educate the community to better support survivors and respond to gendered and sexual violence.
Feeling curious about our work? Get updated information about our upcoming programming through our monthly newsletter.
Support Groups
Healing in Solidarity
Join us Wednesday afternoons from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. on the Waterloo Campus for our survivor-to-survivor peer support group. We hope that this group will be a space to connect, relax and co-exist in solidarity. Brantford peer support group to come soon!
Workshop and Speaker Series
Our workshops and speaker series for all students provide support and focus on how to build knowledge and skills to respond to disclosures and build solidarity for survivors.
Our current workshops and events include:
Online Training
We provide online learning opportunities to increase our collective awareness of sexual violence in order to create a safer, caring and more accountable campus for all.
Laurier has online bystander training available to all students, staff, and faculty members. This training covers consent, gendered and sexual violence, responding to disclosures, bystander interventions and more. We strongly encourage all members of the campus community to complete this training.
Self-register for all modules on MyLearningSpace.
This training is designed to support members of universities and colleges in Ontario to:
- Respond supportively and effectively to disclosures of sexual violence.
- Know where to seek tangible support and resources.
- Learn about professional and organizational practices and initiatives in education and in Ontario.
- Examine one’s own attitudes, behaviours and beliefs.
- Ensure that survivors are treated with respect and dignity, and that they receive the supports needed to recover and change their lives.
This training will provide a certificate once completed. Register online at respondingtodisclosuresoncampus.com.
Recorded Events and Workshops
Missed one of our speakers or previous workshops? Take a look at some of the recordings we have below.
Toxic masculinity is the measuring of masculinity by toxic standards – namely by a man's ability to dominate through violence, sex, ownership and emotionlessness. But what else can masculinity be? Talk with Richie Reseda about the endless possibilities.
Biography
Freed from prison in 2018, Richie Reseda is a producer and abolitionist-feminist organizer. He founded Question Culture, a social-impact record label; Success Stories, a transformational feminist program for incarcerated men chronicled in the CNN documentary "The Feminist on Cell Block Y;" and cofounded Initiate Justice, which organizes people directly impacted by mass incarceration to change laws to end it. He works closely with Black Lives Matter, Inspire Justice and more, to transform narratives and upend systems of oppression.
View the recording:
Over the past 30 plus years the feminist anti-violence movement has come to heavily rely on the criminal justice system to address gender-based violence. Since then there has been extensive critique, in particular from BIPOC organizers/survivors and their allies, of this alliance. Research has shown that enhanced law enforcement does not clearly result in decreased rates of gender-based violence (Richie, 2012). Andrea Smith, an INCITE! co-founder, wrote that “women of color and their allies are hungry for a new approach toward ending violence."
What is clear, is that we need more than one pathway to justice for those impacted by gender-based violence. This panel will discuss the critical need for the anti-violence movement to shift its relationship with the criminal justice system and explore opportunities for justice and healing through non punitive accountability strategies.
Facilitator and Speakers: Nneka McGregor, Carol Bilson, Cassandra Mensah, and Michelle Sutherland.