Jen Brockman, in keeping with a national call to action, is part of an effort to eliminate sexual violence in a generation.

At the University of Kansas, Brockman and the new office she leads have started scratching the surface. KU’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Education Center, or SAPEC, marked its one-year anniversary this month.

That’s “too short of a time to really expect a culture shift. We’re looking to address attitudes, behaviors and beliefs,” Brockman said. “We are playing what we call the long game.”

A chancellor-appointed sexual assault task force that met throughout the 2014-15 school year named such a center one of its top priorities in its final report. KU announced plans for the center in October 2015, and a few months later Brockman was hired as its first director.

Jennifer Brockman

The center has had a busy first year.

• For one, nearly 15,000 people have received training through the center, according to the center’s annual summary. More than 9,000 students, more than 1,000 employees and more than 4,800 community partners including KU parents participated in live trainings.

• The center provided some 70 awareness events, has been active on social media and did a lot of collaborating with students and departments to develop all those trainings and programs in the first place, Brockman said.

• The center’s many trainings have taken place at fraternities, sororities, student club meetings, a few KU classrooms, academic departments and also with all KU Athletics teams, Brockman said. She said the center worked with teams to do most trainings in their off-seasons. In addition to SAPEC’s small group “training camps,” Brockman said coaches and athletes helped choose other trainings for their respective groups, such as consent, bystander intervention or healthy relationships.

• The center also developed KU’s mandatory online sexual assault prevention training, in its first year. The training, called “Think About It,” was chosen after KU focus groups reviewed four national online programs, Brockman said.

All students are required to complete the training — or face a registration hold — unless they have been affected by trauma and feel the training would negatively affect them, Brockman said.

Those students can sign up to take an alternative program through KU’s CARE coordinator at Watkins Health Services.

Last semester 20 students did that, Brockman said, and about half of them continued working with the CARE coordinator for other resources.

The center now is up to its full staff of three full-time employees and one part-time employee.

Last summer, two prevention educators joined Brockman. One is Dustin Struble, formerly with KU’s Student Involvement and Leadership Center, whose work focuses on bystander intervention and men’s engagement. The other is Meagan Collins, who focuses on healthy relationships and consent.

SAPEC also has a part-time intern, a graduate student employee, focused on data analysis and assessment.

The center’s total budget is about $240,000, Brockman said. Most is from the chancellor’s office budget, with some from KU’s student affairs budget, she said. A small amount, about $3,000 a year, is grant funded.

With the center staffed and organized and with key programs developed, Brockman said a big goal for coming years is finding more outside funding.

“My goal is to secure private and public grants that would help our program grown and sustain, and doing so in a way that does not compromise or negatively impact our community base,” she said.

Brockman believes her center can make a difference.

She said it’s important for her center’s educational work to be done in tandem with proper policies and procedures for when an assault does occur. In addition to Watkins Health Center, SAPEC does works with other units at KU, such as Student Affairs and the Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access.

“Prevention is the method that will stem the flow of violence and create this cultural change,” Brockman said. “If all we’re doing is responding, then we’re never affecting it happening in the first place.”