Care To Act at UCM

You may have seen the announcement in late March that our campus would be transitioning away from the Green Dot violence prevention strategy to a new approach, through our grant from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services/Section on Women's Health.

At UCM, the new program is called Care To Act, and (as Green Dot was) is housed in the Office of Health Promotion - and we are very excited about it!

The next step is about to begin: starting this week, and over the next 2-3 weeks, student workers will be stopping at locations around campus to distribute Care To Act info cards and window clings for offices. We ask that you please display the window cling in a student-facing area if possible, and at the same time remove Green Dot items from display.

A staff person will be coming on board in early September to help us move the program forward; for now, please reach out to me with any questions or ideas for partnerships. And watch the UCM Daily for information about how to be trained as a facilitator, how to request a facilitated conversation for your office, class, student org, or other campus group, and how we'll begin to share Care To Act more broadly with our students!

WARRENSBURG, MO – Building upon a culture that encourages individuals to make a positive difference in the lives of others, the University of Central Missouri this fall is introducing the Care To Act initiative.

Care To Act is a new multilevel approach that, in part, is designed to accomplish violence prevention objectives that were previously reached through the nationwide Green Dot program that was offered at UCM and at other colleges and universities. Since its adoption at UCM in 2015, this bystander intervention program, supported by a cooperative agreement between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, has featured educational programming designed to promote a community that is respectful and dedicated to preparing individuals who understand their roles in preventing violence.

Click here to read the full article!

In early 2021 the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services/Section for Women’s Health (SWH) completed a thorough review of Missouri campuses’ implementation of the Green Dot violence prevention strategy, including years worth of feedback from each campus that was implementing the Green Dot strategy. At that time SWH decided that Green Dot was no longer the best fit for statewide prevention efforts on college campuses. 

SWH made the decision to create and implement their own multi-level violence prevention programming, specifically focusing on three projects: online pre-matriculation training, bystander intervention training, and prevention elements at the community level of the social-ecological model. This new program, utilizing the Collective Impact model, was developed by Missouri Partners in Prevention, with research and technical expertise provided by the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence.

As part of the UCM Office of Health Promotion, this expanded violence prevention strategy will engage students, faculty, and staff, as well as local and state level resources, to coordinate existing and new efforts to maximize the reduction of violence within a frame of citizenship, building community connection, and the concept of caring for others, and will address issues related to interpersonal violence, substance misuse, bias and discrimination, and mental health/suicidality.

Staff within the Office of Health Promotion (and other interested staff and faculty) will receive training in the new strategy this summer, and the new program will launch at UCM in the Fall of 2022. While the working name of this new program is Engage, the program name for our campus has yet to be decided. More information coming soon!

For more information email Suzy Latare, Manager of the Office of Health Promotion, at latare@ucmo.edu.