Tell me about ZBT’s upcoming Green Light Go Event:
Green Light Go is a pretty simple concept. If you ever played Red Light, Green Light as a kid (red is stop, green is go), it’s that game, around the concept of sexual assault prevention and consent—teaching the signs of consent and helping really challenge the social norms that have allowed sexual assault to happen on college campuses.
Where did the idea for the event come from?
It kind of came out of multiple conversations: JWI (Jewish Women International, ZBT’s national philanthropic partner), and Meredith Jacobs, specifically, she is their Vice President, we’ve had meetings about Green Light Go for the past…every single week since May, so it’s been a long time coming, the making of this.
[JWI] already had a program with ZBT called Safe Smart Dating, where they teach people healthy and safe dating practices in relationships; a lot of these same issues can come up in relationships but people are even less willing to talk about it because maybe they see something they don’t understand. And it also happens in marriages too; a lot of this stuff can happen but it goes very unheard of in those kinds of relationships.
So, during the national convention of ZBT, another president of ZBT in the area and I approached Meredith Jacobs and we said, ‘hey, we love Safe Smart Dating, it’s a great program, but we don’t think it goes far enough.’ We wanted to create something new. ZBT and JWI were already working on something, so we kind of got involved from the beginning and we created this program out of nothing and it became something amazing. It’s kind of weird—the Red Light Green Light game—but it matched up so well, and it just turned into something bigger than I ever thought.
We met every single week for hours, just throwing out every single idea we could and then just narrowing it down, coming up with the questions, the script, the video, what we wanted to project. We wanted to be very realistic about what was happening on college campuses, and not beat around the bush on a lot of stuff. And the biggest thing for me, why I think this program is so great, is that it is peer-to-peer. A lot of programs fail because they don’t know how to connect with millennials, so this program allows peers to teach their other peers important information, especially if it is coming from student leaders.
Why now?
I think it is an ongoing issue and there is always room for improvement, and obviously within the last couple of years, what’s happening with Title IX funding and especially the rise of assaults across the nation, there’s always a time to do something and what better time than the present.
What sort of reactions have you gotten from people?
Positive, completely positive. Everyone is super involved, the school is super into it, every organization I’ve approached: Interfraternity Council, Panhellenic Association, Multicultural Greek Council, Students Against Sexual Assault, GW’s Colonial Health Center, the Student Association, the national partners (It’s On US, PAVE, No More, Men Can Stop Rape), everyone is super involved and everyone loves the idea and everyone is behind it.
Other than hoping to break a Guinness World Record, what sort of impact do you think this will leave or hope to leave?
We want to continue the conversation; we want to ignite that national conversation but we want it to go somewhere. We don’t want the conversation ever to stop, and we want people, especially if they aren’t sure of things, to really get the answers to what they aren’t sure of. A lot of this stuff happens with our friends and our peers; we want to make sure that we are creating a safe environment for everyone, and everyone understands the things that they are putting on themselves.
[Editor’s Note: Green Light Go will take place Saturday, October 24th in U-Yard.)