The Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) passed a motion to amend last year’s pilot policy that tied clubs and societies’ funding to training in sexual violence prevention at an Aug. 29 council meeting.
The training is provided by OurTurn Carleton. OurTurn is a student-led initiative to combat sexual violence; it was created at Carleton, but has since become a national taskforce in training university staff and students in sexual violence prevention.
Last year’s policy mandated that five members from CUSA clubs and societies had to be trained to receive funding. This year, CUSA councillors voted to specify that five “executives” must be trained instead of just any members.
According to the new policy, “clubs with less than five executives without previous training, or with a total number of executives greater than five, all their executives must complete the training to make up a total of at least five executives trained.”
OurTurn Carleton’s president, Caeleigh Wannamaker, said the organization has trained more than 900 students since the pilot program came into effect last year.
Natalie York, CUSA’s vice-president (internal), presented the motion to council, after it had been delayed from a previous CUSA council meeting on July 31. At the July meeting, CUSA president David Oladejo said that the motion should be tabled to make room for changes to OurTurn’s training policy, after hearing feedback from clubs and societies.
“A lot of clubs aren’t able to mandate five executives to actually do OurTurn training as it was structured last year,” Oladejo said at the meeting. “What we’re now looking to do is work on the structure and make sure the training is able to cater to smaller clubs.”
York’s initial motion in August suggested that executives who have completed the training in the last year need not be required to do it again, motioning for a two-year certification instead of the yearly mandate from last year.
“I’ve gotten feedback from clubs that I had emailed, and they have felt that they did not always have time to get training done,” she said at the meeting. “From our side, I think it’s just that we want more people to be trained, instead of the same people being trained again.”
But, Wannamaker said she disagreed.
“I feel like if club executives really do have a commitment to their student body and to this agenda, and in general, I think they would take the time out of their day to attend the training again—it’s not that time-consuming,” she said at the meeting.
Wannamaker added that the training also changes by roughly 20 to 40 per cent each year. She said intersectionality, for example, was added into this year’s training.
According to previous Charlatan coverage of OurTurn, last year’s OurTurn training included a 90-minute peer-to-peer session that provided information about consent, sexual violence, and rape culture, directly applicable to campus events and student life.
After a heated debate among councillors, York retracted her motion to amend the training, and worked on a motion with CUSA councillor Adam Dublin that kept the one-year training in place. The majority of council voted to approve Dublin’s motion.
Clubs and societies will undergo OurTurn’s sexual prevention training in September.
File photo
