Juan Young Trust Awards $10,000 Grant to Campus Wellness Program
The Juan Young Trust has awarded a $10,000 grant to Pacific University’s Campus Wellness program, in support of sexual violence prevention programming. The grant will be used to expand Pacific’s peer education program to reach more students and cover more topics related to social health and wellness.
Funding from the Juan Young Trust will be used to establish a Train the Trainer program with the goal of making Pacific a safer and healthier place for all students. The grant will provide for 40 hours of training from the Sexual Assault Task Force to train 12 students as peer educators. It will also send 10 students to attend a Train the Trainer Retreat, so that these students can assist in training peer educators in future years, ensuring that the program is sustainable. Additional funds from the grant are to be used to produce a variety of printed materials and videos for several workshops.
The mission of Campus Wellness is to promote the social health and wellbeing of Pacific students through comprehensive educational programming and support services. Current services offered include interpersonal violence prevention efforts, harm reduction with drugs and alcohol, stress management, positive body image, and confidential advocacy for survivors of interpersonal violence. Peer educators play a key role in promoting the social health and wellbeing of Pacific’s students. They help with orientation programming and provide workshops throughout the year on healthy relationship, sexual violence prevention and stress management. They are also confidential peer advocates who students can approach if they are uncomfortable speaking with a staff member.
“Peer education has been shown to be an effective intervention around sensitive issues including promoting healthy relationships, preventing sexual violence, and harm reduction with drug and alcohol use,” says Campus Wellness Coordinator, Kathleen Converse. “Students are often more comfortable talking about these issues with peers than professional staff allowing for deeper conversations, and more effective prevention efforts. The use of peer educators and the funding from the Juan Young Trust will help us to create a safer campus community for all students. In addition, the peer educators benefit from the program as well by gaining leadership and facilitation skills that will set them up for success in their future careers.”
The Juan Young Trust has supported Pacific University students, faculty and outreach for more than a decade, and has awarded Pacific $230,000 during that time. It has provided grant funding for research into a program to prevent chronic disease in low-income minority youth through school-based health education, as well as helped fund the new EyeVan, providing mobile optometry and vision care to Oregon and Southwest Washington. The trust also provides an annual scholarship for undergraduate students, who are lineal descendants of former Kienow’s Food Store employees. Juan Young was a long-time employee, officer and stockholder of Kienow’s Food Stores.
Pacific University is committed to inspiring students to think, care, create and pursue justice. Gifts to the university support its $80 million fundraising campaign, Lead On: The Campaign for Tomorrow at Pacific University, which seeks to grow endowments, learning environments and innovations for a boundless future for students. To learn how to support student scholarships, outreach and other programs like the Juan Young Trust, visit pacificu.edu/lead-on.