Michael Ayalon

Sexual violence is a serious and complex public health problem. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, about 97,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 report experiencing alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape each year. We focus on preventing sexual violence perpetration before it happens to achieve the greatest impact. Our prevention strategies are consistent with best practices developed with the Sexual Assault Center in Nashville, Tennessee and are theory-based. From the individual perspective, you will build consent, bystander intervention, and healthy relationship skills with an evidence-informed interactive session.

From an organizational perspective, you will engage campus leadership to promote a campus culture of consent, safety, and respect. From a community perspective, you will see initiatives taken to strengthen and support enforcement, response, and reporting on and off campus.

Were you thrown into your position in your Fraternity, Sorority or company with little training or knowledge of the position? One of the biggest problems you face is that you are constantly reinventing the wheel, and then repeat the same mistakes made in the past because of a lack of officer transition and training in your organization. All of your effective recruitment techniques, fundraising programs, scholarship initiatives, risk management procedures, and other organizational memory is lost when people leave and you may not effectively be teaching their replacements.

You will learn how to identify and train future leaders, ensure successful officer and job transition, and properly set new goals for the upcoming year based on best practices from over 125 chapters in North America, including student leadership training and retreats. You will understand what effective committee structure looks like and why that’s important. You will review effective meeting and communication.

As the demographics of our Universities become more diverse, and as the problems that we face as a community become much more complex, it's so critical to have regular conversations with your members about the importance of diversity. When people ask what makes a successful chapter, the answer is always diversity of membership.

When we hear about diversity in organizations, it's easy to become uncomfortable because you might think about things like quotas, affirmative action, race relations, and gender inequalities. Really, all we're talking about is a relationship between people, not a particular individual. You will be able to demonstrate the science of diversity and how it leads to more successful organizations. Diversity can be discussed in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, physical abilities, and age. It also can be thought of as the tools you are given in your perspective and experience that comes from different places.

There are University and organizational policies in place to keep your members and guests safe at all times, yet among college students, daily drinking is up and daily marijuana usage is up significantly from 1994 to 2014. You will need to understand the risks associated with alcohol and drug usage, the opioid epidemic, group culture, and how all students can safely intervene if you see someone struggling with addiction.

Over 35% of college students report binge drinking in the last 2 weeks (5 or more drinks in a row). Over 42% report that they have been intoxicated in the last month. Given these statistics, it's important to openly discuss the challenges associated with these numbers, and what you can do about it within our organizations.