According to recent rankings by “Entrepreneur” magazine, SLU has one of the most successful programs for entrepreneurship studies in higher education, as its graduate program ranked at no. 20 and undergraduate program ranked at no. 33 on the list. 

SLU’s legacy of entrepreneurship academia and deep connection to the burgeoning St. Louis start-up community is evident inside and outside the classroom, where students are challenged to develop and put entrepreneurial mindsets to use.

Senior and aspiring entrepreneur Nathan Held has been part of SLU’s entrepreneurship program since his freshman year. In addition to its great reputation, the quality of faculty is another aspect of the program that stands out to him.

“I like that entrepreneurship is a little broader and gives you a study of all disciplines of business. I like SLU’s program especially, as we have some great faculty and are ranked highly,” he said.

Faculty in the department include professor Jerome Katz, Ph.D., who holds the Robert H. Brockhaus Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship. He has been involved with SLU’s entrepreneurship program for over 30 years and performs research in many entrepreneurial arenas, including global startup identification and educational opportunities.

His own entrepreneurial endeavors and professional experiences laid the foundation for his textbook “Entrepreneurial Small Business,” which he utilizes in the courses he teaches at SLU. It is also included nationally within higher education entrepreneurship curriculums.

 “The book is regarded as unusually hands on and practical for an academic textbook … The stories I’ve heard from the community and the stories created by our SLU student entrepreneurs become the vignettes and case studies students all over the world (there are international and Chinese versions of the text) learn about and from,” he commented.

The program’s emphasis on hands-on learning extends to the wealth of resources offered to students outside the classroom. The Chaifetz School of Business also puts on annual student competitions such as the Pure Idea Generator, Real Elevator Pitch and Pitch and Catch contests, in which students have the opportunity to develop and pitch their ideas while being exposed to other entrepreneurs in the St. Louis community. 

“Students have come to SLU for the entrepreneurship program from all over the world, and when they see what a great startup-supporting community St. Louis is, they decide to stay here. During any given year, we’ll have over 300 local entrepreneurs in our classes as speakers, judges and mentors, and that connects town and gown in all sorts of beneficial ways.

Many SLU alumni have gone on to develop their ideas into corporate, social and independent business ventures, including SLU trustee and benefactor Dr. Richard A. Chaifetz. Chaifetz is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of ComPsych Corporation, the largest employee wellness program today, as well as Chaifetz Group, a private investment firm. He has since donated $15 million to launch the Chaifetz Center for Entrepreneurship and to support SLU’s business school, which has been named in his honor. Through SLU’s entrepreneurship program, Katz believes that “We prepare a world of SLU entrepreneurs for the world of entrepreneurship.”

New investigations into software applications by SLU researcher and assistant professor of computer science Flavio Esposito, P.h.D, has proven that the sky is the limit when it comes to technology. 

Esposito was recently awarded with a $206,206 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study distributed computing systems like the Cloud, as well as edge computing capabilities. 

As the leader of this cutting-edge research, Esposito aims to study how decomposition, or breaking up, of complex problems in computer science can be applied to improving application software performance and capabilities via cloud computing. He plans to investigate how to best apply these insights to a wide variety of software, including Virtual and Augmented Reality

“Several applications today (on our phones, watches or computers) rely on cloud technologies. The future is, however in distributed computing. This means, taming big datasets, as well as reducing the time to obtain a response from a computer.  This emerging paradigm is called “edge or fog computing,” or computing at the edge of our end-users, not far away in the cloud somewhere

Joined by researchers at Bentley University and Boston University, their team plans to push the boundaries of computing power to better understand how to partition an application to drive cost efficiency and usability for the user.

Esposito points out the possible technological, as well as societal implications of this work, “The purpose of this study is to improve the way we can speed up very large computations with distributed (networked) systems. The results from this grant will have an impact on several fields, from the search of a genome sequence in bioinformatics, to increasing the revenue in an eCommerce application, to predict when the next tornado is going to hit and where”.

He adds that, “We will produce and release publicly code and publications that could help advance other research, and could help increase the profit for some computer science based companies that deal with large datasets and artificial intelligence.”

The project also plans on providing educational opportunities for high school students and populations underrepresented in the computer science field to learn about, and become trained, in application software and cyberstructure management through interactive tutorials and mentorship. 

Esposito brings several years of experience performing cloud computing research to this project, and is grateful for another opportunity to learn about, as well as develop, software applications of the future. 

At the same time, he is most excited to, “Work with excited and motivated students, to help them be prepared for their next stage of their career!”

The only thing not pleasant about receiving a $3,310 check and state-of-the-art hospitality is potentially receiving the flu because of it.  Last week, SLU’s Center for Vaccine Development initiated its human influenza challenge to better understand the flu and learn how to best prevent it in the future. As part of this study, human volunteers aged 18–49 will be staying on campus in SLU’s Extended Stay Research Unit, located within the Salus Center. This research resort houses 24 rooms featuring private bathrooms, Internet, TV and even catered meals. The only catch for the guests is that they may potentially catch the flu.

Participants will be injected with a vaccine or placebo and then will be exposed to a strain of the flu virus via a nasal spray. They will then be quarantined in the research unit and monitored on the clock for flu-like symptoms such as fever, body aches, coughing and diarrhea. Swabs from the nose and throat and samples of blood taken from the volunteers will provide researchers further insight into the body’s immune responses to the virus. 

This “challenge” differs from more traditional flu vaccine research. Other clinical methods only administer the vaccine to see if the immune system will respond by creating antibodies to fight the virus, while this study deliberately challenges the body by injecting a vaccine and then exposing it to the flu to see if people get sick or not.

In a university press release, Daniel Hoft, M.D., Ph.D., Director of SLU’s Center for Vaccine Development, comments on the benefits of the challenge structure: “You know when they’re exposed to the flu, so you can plan exactly when to study it. You are not waiting for nature to take its course. If a challenge trial shows the vaccine protected a small group of volunteers against the flu, you can be much more confident the vaccine is more likely to be worth the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment to go through phase 3 development,” Hoft said.

The flu is a leading cause of death in the United States, with this past 2017–2018 flu season on record as one of the most severe. To combat this, new flu vaccines are developed every year to fight seasonal strains. The challenge is that the influenza virus is constantly mutating, which can render some vaccines less effective than they are predicted to be. Last year’s flu vaccine was only 40% effective, according to the CDC. The search is on for an effective, and even universal, vaccine for all strains of influenza.

As part of this search, SLU’s pioneering efforts in vaccine testing within its human “challenge” unit are funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. SLU is one of nine Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units that were chosen by the NIAID in 2013 to study vaccine development in order to protect people from infectious diseases.

Solomon Cargill, Ph.D. and associate professor of health care ethics in SLU’s College of Arts & Sciences, recognizes the advantages to this study, while also addressing potential ethical questions that can be raised from challenge studies like this.

 “Broadly speaking, the first major ethical implication is that, unlike clinical care, which we understand to have an obligation to first ‘do no harm,’ this type of research, by intentionally exposing healthy people to the flu, clearly does some harm.”

This demonstrates the importance of measuring the weight of the potential benefits of the study against its risks. The risks of the study need not be zero, but must be minimized to participants, and for healthy participants, this usually means that any potential harms are temporary and reversible,” she added.

She also makes the point that studies like this that offer high compensation for participation can target those of lower socio-economic status or literacy levels, who may feel more pressure to expose themselves to danger for monetary rewards down the road. 

Even though the Extended Stay Research Unit is designed carefully—with safety for volunteers and non-study participants in mind—the proximity of Cargill’s office to the Extended Stay Research Unit prompts her to question the ethicality of the location. “In other words,” she says, “by intentionally infecting people with the flu in a public building on campus, where many work and other patients come for treatment, does this study pose risks of infecting those who have not consented to be in this study?”. 

Regardless of these ethical implications, Cargill concludes that “this research carries with it great potential benefits to society, since more effective flu vaccines would benefit most people and likely save the lives of those who are more vulnerable to the flu’s effects”.

Proposals to cultivate gardens, engineer education and humanize homelessness were among the recently announced winners of SLU’s 1818 Community Engagement Grant Program. The Center for Service and Community Engagement piloted this program last year in celebration of SLU’s bicentennial year. By awarding up to $1,800 for student-led service and advocacy projects, it provides students the opportunity to make the difference they want to see in our world. 

“It’s a chance—and a challenge—to put our Jesuit mission into action,” says Andrew Sweeso. Sweeso serves as the President of SLU’s Labre Ministry with the Homeless, one of the recipients of the grant. Labre is an organization that aims to build fellowship between students and those experiencing homelessness in the St. Louis community. Their project, titled “The Labre and Friends Community Dinner,” will implement a community dinner and resource fair on SLU’s campus for students and those experiencing homelessness. 

Having access to this resource will steer the group’s focus to coordinating the community-building aspect of the event as opposed to raising the funds to make it happen. “Along with giving us a greater sense of confidence that we will be able to put on this event on our campus, this grant gives us hope that SLU will become more open to building stronger community ties with our friends and neighbors, and support our and many others’ efforts to build a much more inclusive, sharing campus environment,” Sweeso adds.

This sense of community spans across every initiative, as all student-led groups are required to partner with a local non-profit to carry out their goals. Last year, through the joint efforts of 48 non-profit organizations and 306 SLU students and faculty, the Community Engagement Grant Program impacted 1,100 children and adults in the St. Louis area. The fact that 16 of the 18 winning projects from last school year plan to continue their individual programs into this school year demonstrates the program’s ability to make a lasting difference.

Recipients of this year’s award in addition to Labre include projects intended to support minorities in STEM, promote immigration advocacy, make possible healthier eating and living habits, and more. 

Bobby Wassel, Assistant Director of the Center for Service and Community Engagement, acknowledges the ability for the program to make an impact on and off our campus. “It impacts both in a tangible way—the projects certainly impact the St. Louis community” … “but it also has a positive impact on the development of our students as leaders.  It teaches them the importance of communication, resiliency, fiscal responsibility, engaging in teamwork, etc”.

Wassal encourages students interested in service to find more information by exploring the plethora of resources offered by the Center for Service and Community Engagement, including one-time volunteer opportunities as well as a database of over 500 community partners, which are both housed on their website. There is also the option to fill out a service form, which will match one’s interests to volunteer opportunities around the area. 

“We are a diverse group of individuals, and our identities may certainly put us at a place of marginalization in life; however, we all share a common privilege, and that is attending a university in pursuit of an advanced degree,” he says.  “Among many things, students should use this privilege to work for the betterment of society, whether in small or big ways”.

They say that the best presents in life come in small packages. However, the generous $4 million gift to the nursing school from Trudy Busch Valentine, an alumna of SLU’s nursing department, proves that it isn’t the size of the gift that matters, but rather its ability to keep on giving.

In recognition of this gift, and her continuing support of the school, SLU renamed its nursing school the Trudy Busch Valentine School of Nursing earlier this semester.

This gift is one of many donations that support a current fundraising initiative on campus titled Accelerating Excellence: The Campaign for Saint Louis University. Its goal is to fundraise $500 million in order to steer our research and academic efforts into prominent fields like the health sciences in order to be at the forefront of innovation and excellence. The campaign has already seen major support, with their fundraising efforts totalling $98.7 million last year.

This achievement reflects the character of many alumni and other advocates of the university, such as Trudy Busch Valentine. It also shows their deep commitment to SLU and its mission.

Jane Baum, Senior Director of Development Health Sciences at Saint Louis University, comments on the importance of alumnae engagement that, “Support from our alumni, friends and community is important for not only the nursing program, but the University and the community. The school will graduate our students, and they will in turn go forth into our community and abroad to share their knowledge. By supporting through the campaign, our University will attract the best and brightest of faculty, staff and students.” 

Valentine’s role as an alumna extends further than a simple monetary donation. She herself graduated from the Saint Louis University School of Nursing in 1980. Two of her children followed in her footsteps to receive their degrees from SLU. Christina Valentine Cammon, her daughter, also graduated from SLU’s nursing program, while her son, Stephen, is pursuing a law degree at SLU. 

Even as a teenager, Valentine’s passion for people and nursing was evident, especially when she  started volunteering for the pediatric unit of the former St. Anthony’s Hospital on Chippewa.  Her philanthropic involvement continued further within numerous organizations including Boys Hope Girls Hope, Edgewood Children’s Center, Caring Solutions, Almost Home, and Churchill Center & School, in addition to dedicating herself as a volunteer nurse for several other groups.  

Baum adds, “She genuinely cares about the mission at Saint Louis University and Cura Personalis. We are fortunate and honored that she shares not only her treasure, but, most importantly, much of her time and talents as well,” she said.

Baum adds that “the gift will be to support faculty and staff in the form of support for their scholarly work, research, leadership with faculty, colleagues, students and School of Nursing constituents. Additionally, the service activities that support the social justice and mission of the Saint Louis University School of Nursing.”

There have been several new developments in the nursing department in the few weeks since the renaming. One faculty member, Verna Hendricks-Ferguson, Ph.D., the Irene Riddle Endowed Professor of Nursing at SLU, will help spearhead a National Institute of Health study to explore how to better the communication between medical staff and families of terminally-ill children. Further, Denise Côté-Arsenault, Ph.D., the Hemak Endowed Professor of Maternal Child Nursing in SLU’s nursing department, was just named a Fulbright scholar in support of her ethnographic study detailing the effect of Scottish culture on neonatal care in this region.

Baum is excited about the trickle-down effect of a gift like this and its ability to affect so many. “This gift will impact not only the faculty and staff through scholarly support and resources, it will touch all of our students who will then touch so many lives in their daily work,” she said. 

With suicide rates escalating across college campuses, SLU is at the forefront of suicide prevention and education. This past week, SLU’s Campus Recreation and Wellness Center orchestrated Suicide Prevention Week, in order to express to students that there simply is no SLU without you. Campus Rec and Wellness demonstrated their care and genuine concern for students by passing out complimentary donuts on West Pine, as well as hosting destress events like free fitness classes and a ‘dive-in’ Disney movie. Throughout the week, students also had the opportunity to sign the “U Matter” pledge to show their committment to being proactive with suicide prevention in their own lives, and the lives of others.

SLU has piloted Suicide Prevention Week for the past several years, with their mission being to spread awareness of the resources and support available on campus for students to turn to. Jodi Seals, the Assistant Director of Health Education and Promotion for the Campus Rec and Wellness Center, has been an active leader of the event the past two years. 

Seals speaks on the importance of starting the conversation about suicide on college campuses. “We know that teens and young adults are the most vulnerable population when it comes to suicidal ideation and we want our students to know we want them here and that we have resources to help them,” she said. 

With suicide being a leading cause of death for those 15-24 years old, it is deafingly clear that suicide is a grim, yet urgent matter that needs to be addressed. 

Seals recognizes the weight of the matter, and hopes to alleviate it by showing students that that they do matter and are cared for, with her overarching goal being “For students to see us advocating for their mental health and providing activities for stress relief and mental health resources.”

Furthermore, according to the CDC, more than half of people who died from suicide were never diagnosed with any mental health condition. This is where SLU’s preventative efforts seek to make a difference. Through initatives like Suicide Prevention Week, SLU aims to put its resources out there to encourage those that need help to seek it, as well as to reassure them that others want to help and that they are not alone. 

Seals acknowledges the specialized support system that SLU students have in the university. “SLU takes very seriously our mission of Cura Personalis and supporting our students in Mind, Body, and Spirit. We provide direct support from the Dean of Students, DPS, Student Health, and the University Counseling Center for students who are in crisis, while also putting preventative measures in place to help students reach out before they are in crisis. Many staff and faculty will be going through mental health first aid training this fall and spring to guide as many people as possible who have contact with students to be in positions to help.”

With the largest freshman class in the history of the university on campus this year, SLU has taken action to expand the resources and support it offers for mental health and suicide prevention to account for this.

Seals commented on the enlargement of her own department, “Our Campus Recreation and Wellness team has grown this year in order to support more students, so we now have a GA for Wellness and soon adding a Wellness Coordinator for Mental Health and Wellness,” she added.

Students are encouraged to learn and carry out suicide prevention techniques in their own lives — as it might just save someone else. The university offers the online module titled “Ask. Listen. Refer.” to all students, in order to train them to identify warning signs of potential suicide ideation, as well as how to respond to it in a safe manner. This way, students can feel prepared in the case they themselves, or someone they know, is at risk for suicide.

Other events on campus that will promote healthy minds and actions include Healthy Campus Week, which takes place all of next week, as well as Mental Illness Awareness Week, happening  October 7th-11th. The Campus Rec and Wellness Center will also be partnering with another group on campus, Active Minds, to provide further suicide prevention initiatives and programming, including campus participation in the Out of the Darkness Walk on September 9th, at Creve Coeur Park. These efforts will complement and continue the conversation about suicide prevention on campus. 

Seals reminds students of the plethora of accessible resources right on SLU’s campus, including the University Counseling Center. Counseling services are free of charge to all SLU students. 

She advises that if you or another student you know is contemplating suicide or self-harm, to contact the University Counseling Center to set up an appoitment right away. They can be contacted during normal business hours for scheduling. For more urgent, or after hour matters, students can reach an on-call University Counseling Center staff member at 314-977-8255 (TALK). If preferred, off-campus resources she recommends include the AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention), as well as Provident Behavioral Health, located in St. Louis.

Despite being only half a mile away, the Cortex Innovation District remains a mystery to most SLU students. A 200-acre hub for technology and science, the Cortex buzzes with over 400 companies and thousands of employees on a daily basis. To generate this same buzz for the Cortex among their own students, SLU and Washington University have partnered to create COLLAB, an academic space within the Cortex geared to host new collaborations in engineering, entrepreneurship and research.

The joint-venture was spearheaded by these two leading research universities and will forge new opportunities for both schools, their students, and the community through classes and events in cybersecurity and entrepreneurship. Along with this, they will support research and its commercial applications to the marketplace.

Aaron Bobick, Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at WashU, foresees the collaborative potential for both universities. “We have complementary strengths: SLU is tightly tied to the community, WashU is tightly tied to the national research picture, and in a nice complementary way we can advance things like that,” he said.

WashU’s engineering department plans to expand their cybersecurity initiative by teaching computer science classes in the COLLAB. “We have a great strength in computer science and cybersecurity that we can bring to the table to augment what SLU already has,” added Bobick.

In addition to cybersecurity, entrepreneurship is a burgeoning topic at SLU and the St. Louis community. SLU’s entrepreneurship program consistently ranks among the best in the United States, and St. Louis continues to be recognized among the top cities for entrepreneurs and start-up companies.

“Cortex is an entrepreneurship center catalyst,” stated Mark Higgins, Dean of SLU’s Chaifetz School of Business. “It sits perfectly with our entrepreneurship program.”

Higgins’ hope is that the offering of entrepreneurship classes at the COLLAB, as well as the accessibility of the space itself, will encourage students to get involved in the plethora of opportunities that the Cortex, and this partnership, has to offer.

Further, the space will soon be home to the entrepreneurship center, which currently resides within the Chaifetz School of Business. The COLLAB will also feature two large teaching rooms and a collaboration space to help facilitate networking between students and the over 400 companies thriving at the Cortex. “Our goal is to demonstrate to students that this is what the business world looks like,” said Higgins.

The COLLAB will expand upon the previous collaboration efforts of WashU and SLU. For the past two years they have offered a joint class titled “Ideas of Mass Disruption” at the Cortex. This class, which will now be offered in the COLLAB, combines cybersecurity and entrepreneurship strategies to address real world problems of the National Geospatial Agency and other business cases. Geospatial science, which examines how location impacts a variety of complex issues from navigation systems to education, is a growing sector with the NGA and SLU at the forefront. The construction of NGA’s headquarters in downtown St. Louis this year and their recent partnership with SLU speaks to the real-world potential of both the COLLAB and classes like “Ideas of Mass Disruption”.

Collaboration with industry leaders like the NGA is just one example of the potency of COLLAB’s placement. “Across the hallway from COLLAB is Boeing. They are a major player in the geospatial world as well. As we pursue conversations and collaborations between SLU and Boeing, this will be a great location for us to come together,” said Ken Olliff, Vice President for Research at SLU.

At the heart of any successful venture—–whether it be geospatial science or cybersecurity—–is research. SLU, a 200-year-old urban university, has the capability and duty as a Jesuit institution to perform research on a variety of topics that impact our world.

“Research is an area of deep expertise for faculty across SLU and touches upon health, education, urban schooling, law, policy, so on and so forth. COLLAB is an asset that enhances our faculty’s ability to take their ideas and discoveries and to have an impact on the broader world,” commented Olliff.

The Research Innovation Group, which oversees research commercialization, will also be positioned within COLLAB.

“In order for moving our research forward and out into the world, this is a great community for us to be able to plug in to, and the COLLAB is the platform to do that,” added Olliff.

With plans still being developed, Olliff encourages use of the COLLAB space.

“COLLAB is a canvas. Ways that our colleges, faculty groups, and students want to use the space, we are open and enthusiastic,” he concludes.

What started as an old delivery truck has grown into a network of four “mobile museums” with the mission of driving the conversation surrounding culture, race and identity. These mobile museums, dubbed The Justice Fleet, “foster healing through art, dialogue, and play,” said Amber Johnson, Ph.D., associate professor of communication at SLU and founder of the Justice Fleet.

“Once you are aware of how social injustice impacts specific people, communities and institutions, it is hard to sit and do nothing” they said.

Johnson works to inspire others both inside and outside the classroom as a scholar, artist and activist. They are also very active in their research on art activism and social justice—in which the idea for the Justice Fleet was developed.

The first truck features the theme of “Radical Forgiveness,” by uniting art activism with social justice. Participants in the exhibit are encouraged to heal through painting a message of forgiveness onto the Forgiveness Quilt. Johnson has been constructing Forgiveness Quilts for over a decade in the classroom as a visual display of liberation from the pain and guilt suffered in social inequity.

“Our mission is simple and universal. There are inequities on every single country on this planet and if we’re going to attempt to fix these inequities we also have to also heal from them, they have to happen at same time,” Johnson said.

Each Justice Fleet truck embodies its own theme surrounding social justice through interactive and creative outlets like paint, toys, legos and even a ball pit. By bringing their message to communities around the country, Johnson hopes to counter the notion that “humans have forgotten how to play and how to imagine.”

“We are constantly in community. We are always working with community members from different marginalized spaces with different traumas and different inequities,” Johnson said.

These tools are intended to initiate healing from injustices as well as build solutions, with the goal being to reflect, engage and apply forgiveness to our prejudices and biases.

Johnson recounts the inspiration they had for the project when they began teaching at SLU in 2015, when Darren Wilson was found innocent after the shooting of Michael Brown Jr. “My students said to me that there’s so much happening and people need healing. You can’t just do this in the classroom. This was how Radical Forgiveness and Injustice Fleet was born,” said Johnson.

Another exhibit named “Transfuturism” celebrates gender embodiment through telling the story of black transgender and nonbinary people. After interviewing and photographing them, Johnson digitally projects the participants as superheros. These pieces of art break down gender and race barriers, and instead lifting participants up.

“I am making the argument that trans and nonbinary people do that in the flesh right now. That you can see evidence of that liberating yourself from the gender binary. You don’t have to speculate it or wait for it in this future horizon, but it’s already happening, that is why we turn them into superheros,” they said.

Radical Imagination, the third exhibit, has “popped up” in various communities more than forty times just this year. This exhibit builds upon the empowerment of both Radical Forgiveness and Transfuturism to engage participants in an experiential learning activity in which they create the world they want to live using a hodgepodge of crafts and art supplies, encouraging an open dialogue about the social injustices and corruption structures that our world is built upon.

Radical Forgiveness, Transfuturism and Radical Imagination have already impacted thousands of people and communities around the world, but the Justice Fleet is not stepping on the brakes just yet. Their up and coming exhibit dubbed Black Girl Magic will explore the oppression suffered by Black girls, women and femmes with the goal of humanizing and empowering them. Johnson is also currently developing two other projects to be launched in the fall: a grief garden to provide a safe space for those suffering from communal traumas, as well as The Institute for Healing Justice and Racial Equity which will be located on SLU’s campus.

Johnson looks forward to the promising future.“Eventually I would even love to give people enough money to build their own exhibits for the Justice Fleet,” they said.

“The world needs things like forgiveness, we need things like imagination,” Johnson said. “We need things to celebrate who we are and what our identities mean to us and those we are connected to.”

SLU is supporting sexual assault awareness month this April with a variety of events geared towards education and awareness of this widespread issue. Events kicked off last week and will last until the end of the month, with SLU’s Breaking Out Campaign particularly involved in these efforts. Since 2016, the mission of Breaking Out, “to encourage the act of healing through art and to counter the culture of silence that isolates survivors,” has grown into a campus-wide call to action.

In the past, their campaign centered around a photo series featuring the stark realities of sexual assault as survivors held posters detailing their individual stories. This year, Breaking Out expanded upon their photo campaign with the addition of several events throughout April, including a new bystander simulation program dubbed “Walking the Walk.” This program provides a glimpse into the varying responses and experiences that survivors go through.

Rock Against Rape, another event held this past week, brought together various groups like KSLU and other acapella groups on campus to spread awareness through music. Events still to come throughout this month include Denim Day, a Lights Out Volleyball Tournament with Billikens After Dark and Walk a Mile in Her Shoes with Beta Theta Pi. The quantity of events as well as the collaboration of Breaking Out with other organizations on campus is a testament to the growing outreach of the campaign as a whole to SLU’s campus.

Colleen Watson, a sophomore studying psychology and the Peer Education Director for the Breaking Out Campaign, envisions that through the campaign’s events and programs, that “we can better educate SLU’s campus and break the silence that shames, blames and isolates victims of sexual assault.”

She adds that “the goal of the Breaking Out Campaign is to end sexual violence; of course we do not want this campaign to last forever, but as this is an ongoing issue that needs to be addressed we will continue our efforts in increasing awareness and education and supporting and believing survivors.”

This issue is not only pertinent to all college students, but SLU in particular. This institution is no stranger to the issue of sexual assault at hand. Just last year, three different sexual assault cases were instigated from across SLU’s campus; these instances ranged from accusations of abuse from athletes to SLU’s medical school faculty.

Watson reiterates the relevance of this chilling reality. “Our campus has seen a lot of instances of assault, even ones that the University does not publicly announce to the students,” she said. “I personally know so many people who have had these experiences and continue to be affected by it.”

“It happens more often than you think,” said Kirsten Bourbon, who is a sophomore studying psychology and another active member of the campaign, serving as the director of events. She too hopes that their efforts will one day eliminate the need for the campaign at all.

Despite their shared dream of one day not needing a campaign, they both recognize its significance today to our population. “Being in college increases everyone’s likelihood of experiencing sexual assault, not just women,” said Watson.

The campaign brought the issue centerstage to the SLU student body while tabling in the BSC on Monday. Alongside providing informational pieces about sexual assault and proper consent, students had the opportunity to write letters to local legislation advocating for the rights of survivors. These letters addressed concerns about the alarming changes being proposed to current legislature, of which would diminish certain resources like counseling and education available to survivors under the current Title IX law.

Students also had the opportunity to fashion a t-shirt to communicate support for survivors and sexual assault awareness. These shirts will be put on public display as part of the Clothesline Project Quilt Initiative. Quilts comprised of t-shirts from previous years are currently exhibited in the CGC for students to glean encouragement from.  

The Breaking Out Campaign offers a resource and a voice to all students. The active role that this campaign and other organizations on campus have taken against sexual assault reflects the ability for SLU as a community to provide support to those afflicted, as well as educate each other on the topic relevant to all of us.

Watson acknowledges the power behind this campaign to truly make a difference. “As we bring it to more and more organizations, it will slowly make a change here at SLU,” she said. She hopes that students will simply want to get involved and learn more. “By simply talking to their friends about what we do, that creates conversation on this stigmatizing topic and creates awareness.” she said.