Sexual Violence and Trauma Training Center of Excellence

MESA offers trainings and presentations on consent, healthy masculinity, bystander intervention and more at schools, businesses, and community organizations.

Training Menu

Safe Bars

Safe Bars is a bystander-education program that aims to create safer, more welcoming spaces for staff and guests at bars, restaurants, and clubs. Safe Bars teaches hospitality staff how to recognize and respond to unsafe situations involving sexual harassment and abuse.

Custom Workshops

MESA custom-designs workshops to train youth and adults in response, intervention, and prevention of sexual violence. MESA has a long history of working with middle and high school students, university students, parents, law enforcement, hospitality staff, sports teams, businesses, and the general public to provide training on this critical and complex issue.

MESA offers the following workshops which can be adapted for the needs and level of each individual group.

General:

Sexual Assault 101

This introductory level workshop provides a basic understanding of what sexual assault is, its prevalence and consequences, and why it happens in our culture.

Prevention:

What is Consent?

This workshop explores the simple yet complex concept of consent. Participants navigate the who, what, when, where, and why of consent, and dive into barriers to getting consent including social norms and substance use.

Healthy Relationships

We explore what a healthy relationship looks like for each of us, identify ways we can be loving partners/companions/lovers, and identify red flags for unhealthy behaviors in ourselves or others.

Bystander Intervention

Participants learn how to assess situations that may become violent and learn how to best intervene to keep others, and themselves, safe. Participants will reflect on cultural change and how their individual actions contribute toward shifting cultural norms.

Rape Culture

This workshop explores the cultural factors which contribute to the prevalence and normalization of gender-based violence. From a place of understanding the roots of violence, participants will explore strategies for prevention based on a socio-ecological framework addressing the individual, relational, community, and societal levels.

Healthy Masculinities

Participants will critically analyze and deconstruct gender stereotypes and the gender binary and explore the concept of hegemonic masculinity. Participants will reflect on connections between hegemonic masculinities and violence, pressures and consequences for not conforming, and the costs of and consequences of conforming.

Response and Intervention:

Sexual Harassment

MESA trains company leadership and staff to create workplaces free of sexual harassment using a socio-ecological paradigm to uncover the roots of harassment and shift group behavioral norms toward intervention and accountability.

How to Help A Loved One

Learn about the physical, mental and emotional impact of trauma, including neurobiological responses, survival mechanisms, and how those impact the way people remember and integrate traumatic experiences.

Trauma-informed Services

Trauma-informed services take into consideration the impact of trauma and adapt services to be sensitive to the needs of trauma survivors. Learn how to tailor your space and services to be more aware of the impact of trauma, shift language to have conversations that are emotionally safe, and discuss strategies for implementing change.

Help for the Helper (Secondary Trauma, Burnout, and Resilience)

Learn about the impact of trauma exposure, identify how secondary trauma shows up in your life, and practice strategies for addressing secondary trauma.

General