Building on the Auraria Campus Safety Initiative established earlier this year, UCD’s Center for Domestic Violence recently launched The Phoenix Center to provide Auraria students, faculty and staff with a variety of domestic violence prevention, awareness and victim services.

The Center is being established with funding from a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice jointly awarded to Metro State, UCD and CCD in February (see http://www.mscd.edu/~collcom/artman/publish/safety_twv6020409.shtml).

Goals of The Phoenix Center include victim services, offender accountability, coordinated campus response to incidents of interpersonal violence, and prevention and awareness.

Domestic violence is a national issue for college students but the Center hopes to help eradicate it on the growing Auraria Campus by offering a 24-hour interpersonal violence helpline, victim support, advocacy and other services. It also plans to conduct high-profile programming to raise overall understanding of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking on campus among students, faculty and staff. It will include information on what domestic violence is, how people can help protect themselves and where they can receive help.

A news conference and ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Phoenix Center will be held on Thursday, Oct. 22. The news conference will be from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in TIV 329, and the ribbon cutting will be from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. in TIV 259. Speakers will include Barbara Paradiso, director of the Center for Domestic Violence, Metro State student Mellissa Kennedy, and Kathy Robertson, mother of Abby Robertson, a student at Metro State who was killed in 2007 by a former boyfriend, also a Metro State student.