By: Minne Ho
When the USC Well-being Collective was first established in January of 2019, with a common agenda of creating a campus culture driven by well-being, sexual assault on college campuses was (and continues to be) a serious and too common problem in higher education. USC has focused on a culture of consent, taking steps including bolstering direct services to survivors –such as the expansion of the Student Health unit that supports survivors and the 24/7 operation of confidential advocates — increasing outreach and education about legal protections through Title IX from the EEO-TIX office, and creating of new prevention education modules including the mandatory facilitated live discussions for undergraduates, the three-year sequence of “Consent and Healthy Relationship” modules.”
Changing culture, however, takes more than increased staffing in specific offices, educational prevention education modules, or a higher level of policy enforcements. Creating a culture of consent and healthy relationships takes the whole community to understand the severity of the problem and then work toward positive change at both the individual and systems level.
In spring 2022, partners in the USC Well-being Collective began to examine the physical environment that USC students inhabit, using the groundbreaking research of Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan, “Sexual Citizens.” Their research produced a toolkit to help campuses reshape their built environment, or sexual geographies: the Sexual assault Prevention and Community Equity (SPACE) toolkit. The initiative to apply the principles in the toolkit in a series of explorations and focus groups involved multiple partners including Housing, Residential Education, Student Life, and Student Health, the Provost’s Office, Real Estate and Asset Management Administrative Operations, USC students, and other stakeholders . The work revealed the challenges in the built environment that “tilt” intimate encounters into situations where one person is disempowered to control the encounter.
The focus group information was clear. As one student described, “There’s nothing else to do, and there’s not a living room, so we just sit on a bed, and dot dot dot…”
Some pursuits of social space add additional loss of ability to control the environment: “We went to the Lorenzo once and got into a party bus to, maybe Torrance – wherever it was it was an hour away – to get on a boat to go drink with strangers, and we Uber’d home.”
Another participant recalled, “When I had my boyfriend here, we didn’t want to go to my dorm yet, we wanted to go somewhere different, so we were just walking up and down Figueroa at 3:00 in the morning…we did a late night snack and then after that we made our way back. After that, yeah, I wish there would have been a space where we could have hung out.”
With the honest feedback shared by students, the partners got to work, exploring options to better utilize systems and spaces for students to socialize safely on and near campus. Emily Sandoval, Associate Vice Provost, Student Development & Engagement (Division of Student Life) and Mark Ewalt, Executive Director of Business Operations and Compliance, Auxiliary Services (Division of Administrative Operations) reviewed the problem, incorporated student feedback, and worked with campus partners to proposed a model where students would have more access to late night social spaces that are only for students. The result is the re-imagined Traditions space, in the center of campus, which is piloting out a weekend late night space for students to gather and socialize.
“We realized that working together, exploring the quantitative data and the qualitative data collected by the Office for Health Promotion Strategy, backbone for the USC Well-being Collective, we are able to better understand the student experience, and make changes together with our campus partners,” explained Emily Sandoval. “Creating change takes cooperation between many partner offices and stakeholders.”
Mark Ewalt, a key partner representative, echoed the importance of cross-collaboration. “It involves many departments understanding the shared objective and doing what they can to move in the right direction,” he said, “from the physical, to the financial, to the programming and planning, many people looked at the data, listened to the student feedback, and were able to make commitments that made this pilot possible.”
A proposal for the opening of a late-night space next to Tommy’s Place and a new food option in the Ronald Tutor Campus Center for late-night food service is in the works with an expected opening in early Spring 2024. Collective impact reflects work of many campus partners who work together; in this way, the community builds a continual process of capacity-building, and constant improvement.