Written by Riley Hutchings
On the night of Oct. 12, the Colorado College Student Government Association (CCSGA) hosted a dialogue about safe spaces on our campus. They invited members from different student organizations, including the Black Student Union (BSU), the Greek Life community, and the Student Association for Sexual Safety (SASS). It was the first in a series of dialogue dinners that will continue throughout this year.
Representatives came from each of these groups to form a total of about 30 students who were then broken up into tables of five or six people and given prompts to discuss. Every table was following guidelines from the Butler Center about how to keep conversations productive and respectful.
Most of what was talked about was how to create more or better safe spaces, with the assumption that safe spaces are good. It was mentioned briefly that safe spaces could be detrimental to students, as they create a sense of safety that doesn’t necessarily exist in the world outside of CC. Beyond that though, the idea was definitely to promote more safe spaces.
Much of the conversation centered on places on campus where each student felt was their safe space, and why. For a lot of people, their rooms or halls are where they feel most safe. The final prompt was to discuss ideas for how safe spaces on campus should change.
At the end of just over an hour of small group discussion, each table shared what they had considered to be the biggest problems on campus, and the representatives tried as a group to create solutions. Among the topics discussed were social pressures in Greek Life and on sports teams, and negative classroom environments that do not allow for safe spaces.
Possible solutions included creating requirements for having safe spaces for certain classes, increasing awareness of habits that make others feel less safe, having more discussion between different groups on campus, and incentivizing Resident Advisors to try and create strong communities in their halls.
Already, CCSGA President Annika Kastetter has tried to do this by visiting clubs around campus. A representative from SASS said that her visit to their club was “a very important symbolic gesture.” SASS has also talked to fraternities about how they can prevent and respond to sexual assault in the best way.
Andrew Pollack, the Vice President of Outreach for CCSGA, said that the starting point is awareness and starting conversations with friends about safe spaces. At the end of the day, the group seemed to agree that though the school can try and create safe spaces, safe spaces happen naturally and gradually over time.
The greater purpose of this meeting for CCSGA was to express their interest in helping clubs and activities across campus create safer spaces.
Kastetter said, “I think we need to do a better job as an organization making sure that we’re doing these things because we’re people on this campus and because we care, not necessarily because we are an organization that’s just trying to check a diversity and inclusion box… That’s how it has been in the past.”