After making significant strides last semester, Students Against Sexual Violence and Feminist Club are looking to expand their outreach. 

SASV is continuing their focus on healthy relationships. Last semester, the club talked with Michele McCormick, the Director of Victim Services at the Kansas State Attorney General’s office, about the behaviors of people who are potentially violent in a relationship. The discussion sparked in-depth conversation about the topic among club members and set the tone for what the club wanted to accomplish in the future.  

“What the group is hoping to do is to bring the conversation into the larger school community about how to have good relationships with people,” SASV sponsor Stacy Tidmore said.  “Specifically romantic [relationships], because that tends to be a topic that is a little bit difficult for high school [students] to engage in, and for all the reasons we can imagine.”

Additionally, SASV wants to positively impact the community through recycling and working at the Manhattan Common Table. 

Feminist Club has a wide-range of projects in progress and a plethora of ideas for the future. Last semester, they focused on community cleanup projects and feminist outreach. This semester, Feminist Club is planning to conduct a laptop sticker fundraiser. Moreover, they are preparing surveys directed towards the student body to receive their input regarding the club’s service to the school. Combating sexual harassment is also a priority for Feminist Club. The club has recently hung up posters in classrooms detailing how victims can access and fill out the grievance form provided by school administration. They are also wanting to design surveys about how students have experienced harassment and how they want the school to approach the issue. 

“One of the things we [have considered] doing is sending out a survey about how many students have experienced this and how they would like the school to approach this … We have a survey designed, but how we are going to administrate it [is] very much in the works,” Feminist Club founder and president Megan Long said. “We also considered doing a project for just awareness and outreach where people would write down the type of things that have been said to them, and then we would put it somewhere, but … that is very much in flux of whether we are going to do that or not.”

Ultimately, Feminist Club wants to foster a positive and safe school environment. 

“I would like the club to become a center of advocacy that people can attend, and … we will be able to have some sort of effect on school policy,” Long said. “Basically I would like it to be a place where we can organize around issues that are specifically around the way that gender is treated in a school … and then take that to the proper authorities within schools.”