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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

MCC, Community Members to Participate in Violence Prevention Training at DCC


About 30 MCC students, faculty and staff and Rochester community members will participate in a three-day training on violence prevention beginning May 20 at the Damon City Campus.

The free training infuses the teachings of Jackson Katz, an author, filmmaker and one of the leading educators in gender violence issues. Katz is co-founder of the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program at Northeastern University in Boston and founder/director of MVP Strategies, an organization that provides gender violence prevention training to U.S. educational institutions, law enforcement agencies, military, professional sports teams, community groups and businesses.

Christine Plumeri, assistant professor of sociology, will conduct the training with Jeff O’Brien, MVP’s national director who has ties to Rochester, at DCC.  Of the participants, half will be MCC students in the “Violence Prevention Through Community and Cultural Change” Learning Community taught by Law & Criminal Justice Professor Joe Sturnick and Plumeri. Julie White, assistant director of Student Services at DCC, serves as this liaison to the college’s Student Services office.  This Learning Community and training will be held every spring semester.

Plumeri became a certified mentor in violence prevention training after attending a train-the-trainer workshop in February at Northeastern. MCC is one of only two colleges in the world to pilot this training into academic coursework. The other institution is the University of Northern Iowa.

Trainees will receive eight hours of training each day and become certified upon completion. Participants will gain awareness about gender violence by examining their own experiences and tolerances, challenge their thinking of mainstream messages by performing visualization exercises in gender-specific groups, and engage in dialogue about creating a safe environment and exploring cultural solutions.

They will also learn how to:

-- Teach people how to respond to sexual harassment, street violence and other forms of violence

-- Empower people, especially college students, to take a stand against violence using logic.

 “Once our students get trained, we expect a few of them to commit to taking what they’ve learned and bringing it into the community,” Plumeri said. Students will do service-learning projects with Rochester-area social justice agencies and organizations and can incorporate their training skills into future careers. “We start to plant the seed so that all can begin taking a stand,” Plumeri said.


The training is sponsored by the Anthropology/History/Political Science/Sociology Department, Office of the Dean of Liberal Arts, and Office of the Dean of Academic Services.

For more information about the training, contact Christine Plumeri at 262-1768 or e-mail "
mailto:cplumeri@monroecc.edu".

Hency Yuen-Eng
College and Community Relations
04/08/2010