Soteria Solutions Provides its OVW Campus Grant TA Expertise in Atlanta and Louisville
Recently, Soteria Solutions’ Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) Campus Grant Technical Assistance (TA) team participated in and presented at three OVW Campus Program Training and Technical Assistance Institutes (TTIs). We are honored to have received a renewed TA award in 2023 to continue to provide our expertise in data-informed approaches to strategic planning and implementing evaluation and assessment strategies. Along with multiple other TA teams from across the country, our team plays a crucial role in supporting OVW Campus Program grantees in ensuring the successful implementation of their grant-funded initiatives to prevent and respond to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking on their campuses.
Background
All Campuses receiving the OVW Campus Grant are required to send representatives to five TTIs. OVW Campus Grant TA providers and consultants facilitate various training sessions throughout each 3-day TTI to provide content knowledge and skill-building to enhance grantees’ capacities to successfully carry out their grant activities over the course of their 3-year awards. The TTIs allow Soteria Solutions’ team to engage with and train hundreds of grantees, comprised of professionals working on, or in partnership with, college campuses. The most recent TTIs, taking place in Atlanta, GA and Louisville, KY, were our team’s first in our renewed award, as well as the first ever for our OVW Project Director, Lee Helmken Cherry. These TTIs also represented an exciting return to mostly in-person TTIs.
In February, members of Soteria Solutions’ OVW TA team traveled to Atlanta for a TTI with concurrent tracks for second and third-year grantees. Second-year grantees were wrapping up over a year of strategic planning, relationship building and campus planning efforts. As these grantees prepared to move into the implementation stage of their grants, Soteria Solutions’ team focused our TTI education on building a foundation for evaluation and assessment through two sessions on general evaluation principles and gathering feedback through program evaluation. For third-year grantees, our team focused on helping grantees plan for the sustainability of the programs and services that they have established through the Campus Grant. The three sessions that Soteria Solutions led, in partnership with other TA Providers, focused on:
Developing ‘pitches’ to advocate for ongoing funding and leadership buy-in using data
Expert roundtable discussions with a number of TA Providers on evaluation and other pertinent topics
Helping grantees identify areas of successes and challenges and how to make course corrections to achieve their grant deliverables in the final year of their grants.
The following month, the team traveled to Louisville, which was an exciting opportunity to meet the newest cohort of grantees who received their awards in October 2023. All campus grantees are required to create and follow a formal strategic plan during their first year that guides their work throughout the grant. The Soteria Solutions team provides the training, grantee materials and oversight of the strategic plan review process, which involves coordination of all of the TA provider teams. Our training sessions at this TTI focused on:
Building the foundation for the required strategic plans, including best practices and utilizing data
Understanding the strategic planning resources and tools that Soteria has created to guide them through this process
Identifying tangible strategies to begin the strategic planning process when grantees return to their home campuses.
Soteria Solutions’ OVW Campus Grant TA team of experts is now gearing up for the next TTI, taking place in Reno, NV in June 2024. This will be another joint TTI, with first-year grantees attending their second TTI and third-year grantees attending their fifth and final TTI. We look forward to seeing everyone there!
While our technical assistance as part of this award is specific to OVW Campus Program grantees, Soteria Solutions’ expertise in strategic planning, assessment and curriculum development extends to our ability to develop evidence-based solutions for colleges, high schools, federal and state agencies and business aimed at preventing and responding to violence, discrimination, incivility and harassment.