At the beginning of the school year the Center for Advocacy, Prevention, and Empowerment (CAPE), a division of the Health and Counseling Center (HCC) created a new program to extend the resources CAPE offers to DU community members.

The Peer Educators are students that were hired by CAPE at the beginning of fall quarter. Their main goal is to ensure CAPE has more on campus presence and is an organization for the students.

“Research shows that the most effective way to provide education to students around gender violence issues is to utilize peer educators because students relate better to peers,” said Gillian Kaag, director of CAPE. “Given this, the HCC made this a priority and supported CAPE in creating the team and program in order to best meet student needs.”

The seven DU Peer Educators work with two people from CAPE: Kaag and Kayla Ham, a graduate intern for CAPE. The seven Peer Educators include: sophomore Carolyn Angiollo; junior Patrick Guillory; senior Adrian Nava; sophomore Hannah Rose; senior Riley Swanso; sophomore Meagan Traver and sophomore Erin Weed. 

The DU Peer Educators have pioneered many HCC-related events on campus as well. This includes, but is not limited to Be a B.O.S.S. trainings, tabling during sexual assault awareness month and love, sex and health week and publicizing CAPE in general. Last quarter, the DU Peer Educators focused on reaching out to greek life. This quarter, they created the Pioneers Actively Looking Out (PAL) Initiative.

The PAL Initiative that the DU Peer Educators are focusing on this quarter is all about the safety of students.

“The PAL Initiative is a collaborative effort between CAPE, Health Promotion, Campus Safety, the Center for Multicultural Excellence and Student Life,” said Kaag. “We came together to figure out how we could build upon our individual bystander intervention programs and look for points of connection across high risk areas (e.g. CAPE works to prevent sexual assault through the Be a B.O.S.S. program and Health Promotion works to prevent alcohol abuse through the Pios Protect program). We also worked with USG to get feedback on how to structure an incentive program that would fit students’ interests and needs. We are hoping to roll the initiative out in two phases, the first focusing on designating a PAL, and the second on being a PAL.”

More information about the PAL initiative can be found at www.du.edu/pal.

DU’s Be a B.O.S.S. program focuses on teaching people how to become leaders and speak up in order to prevent acts of violence. Anyone looking to attend a Be a B.O.S.S. training session, can attend one of the three upcoming sessions CAPE is offering:

• Feb. 10 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. in Sturm 287
• Feb. 16 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Driscoll 135 Suite 1800
• Feb. 18 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in Sturm 492.

Students looking to attend a BOSS training are asked to register for the event.