Anne Johnson is the executive director of Generation Progress, an American non-profit organization that fosters youth empowerment and community action.
In partnership with the White House, Generation Progress recently launched “It’s On Us,” a campaign that aims to stop sexual assaults on college and university campuses. The campaign’s star-studded promotional video features actors Kerry Washington and Jon Hamm, as well as President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden.
The Varsity met with Johnson to discuss changing conversations around campus consent, youth engagement, and social policy.
The Varsity: As executive director, what does your job entail?
Anne Johnson: Totally depends on the day. We run a variety of campaigns around issues that young people care about. We just launched a campaign a couple weeks ago called “It’s On Us,” and it’s a national campaign to prevent campus sexual assault, so that has been a huge focus of my life for the last couple months — getting ready for that launch of that campaign. But, you know, we also work with young people on campaigns around higher education and student debt, we have a gun violence prevention program, so my days sort of depend on what campaign is happening and working with the young people in our networks.
TV: How do you come up with these different campaigns?
AJ: They’re really led by the young people that we work with… The goal of our work is to empower young people to make change in their communities and I think young people are very sophisticated when it comes to identifying problems — what are the issues that they’re facing, whether that’s access to good jobs or access to higher education or preventing gun violence. Young people know what the issues are in their community, and so it’s really less about picking and more about empowering young people to work on those issues. The campus sexual assault campaign, “It’s On Us,” really came out of work with people in the higher-education community, both on campuses and advocacy organizations saying that there needed to be an effort, a national effort around culture change around campus sexual assault. I think it’s really important when we pick our campaigns to work on that we listen to people, we listen to young people and empower them to do work in their communities.
TV: How do young people get involved with the organization?
AJ: We don’t have chapters on college campuses; that’s not exactly our model, but we work with a lot of individual young people who are working on specific issues, so it might be a young person who’s working on climate change in Mississippi, or it could be someone who’s working on gun violence prevention in Chicago, and we just work with a variety of different people. They’re really issue-based campaigns, so the way that people would generally get involved with Generation Progress would be through an organizing campaign around an issue on their campus, so in California, our gun violence prevention network is working on a campaign called the “Campaign to Unload,” which is working on divestment in the state college system around guns, and that campaign is totally localized.
TV: Could you speak more specifically about what Generation Progress does to combat sexual assaults on college campuses?
AJ: This campaign that we just launched a couple weeks ago — it’s a new effort for us, and it’s something that we’re really excited to be a part of. It’s a campaign that we’re working in partnership with the White House on, and we’ve got a couple dozen really amazing partners in the campaign already, including … the NCAA and MTV, and VH1 and Electronic Arts. There’s all sorts of different partners within the campaign and it’s really meant to be a campaign that shapes the way that we think and changes the way that we think and act around campus sexual assault, so we want it to be completely unacceptable for campus sexual assault to exist, and we want to empower young people to be a part of that solution. So it is not a legislative campaign, it’s not a campaign about a specific policy — but it’s more about empowering young people to stop sexual assault.
TV: Have American colleges been improving their policies around consent and sexual assault?
AJ: There’s this thing called Title IX, and Title IX basically says you can’t discriminate against people on college campuses. It’s the thing that led to women being involved in sports on college campuses — equal access. But Title IX also says that sexual harassment is a form of a civil rights violation, and so there’s a Title IX oversight of colleges and universities, which was part of the Higher Education Act. The Department of Education and the Department of Justice at the federal level actually have some authority through Title IX to investigate complaints on college campuses. One of the new things that’s happened is that the Department of Education actually released, for the first time, a list of colleges and universities that had Title IX investigations happening on those campuses. And I think that was a really important step, because it brought to light that there is some transparency in this, and that students have the ability to go to their college, and if they don’t find a place to file a complaint, or they feel like their school is not treating them correctly, then they can file a complaint through the Department of Education, and that school will be investigated.
TV: Do you think the types of things Generation Progress is doing could be applied to U of T and other Canadian colleges?
AJ: Yes, totally. I mean, I think a lot of the work that we do at Generation Progress is about empowering young people to make social change, and I don’t think that matters if you’re in Kansas, Florida, Toronto or anywhere else in the world. I think the campus sexual assault campaign, “It’s On Us,” is a campaign that could be run on any campus anywhere in the world. We actually have a week of action coming up on November 17, and we have events taking place all over the U.S., but we also have young people around the world who are volunteering to host events in other countries.
TV: How do you think students and staff, just anyone on campus, can try to combat sexual assault?
AJ: There’s a really good tool-kit that we put together… so I’d encourage people to download it and look through it, because there’s some good advice on things people can do. One of the first things that we’re asking folks to do is to have a conversation on your campus. There’s probably an organization that exists on your campus that is doing work on this issue already, and so I would encourage students to find people who have expertise on this issue, whether it’s within the university administration or student organization that’s been working on it. Set up a conversation, and try to bring more people in, whether it’s student athletes, chapter presidents, [members] of the Greek system, or people who have a profile on campus. Bring people together to have this conversation about what’s happening on campus; what needs to be done. There’s some really great training programs, called Bystander Intervention, that’s teaching people how to step in when they see something that looks like it could lead to sexual assault.
TV: Have you had any experience with the types of services that colleges provide for sexual assault victims?
AJ: It varies… schools have set up different programs. There are certainly some fantastic ones, and there are some that need a lot of work… I don’t think there’s one sort of model nationally that everyone’s implementing. I think that’s part of the challenge — a lot of different programs in different places. But I think what’s important for students to know is that they have power in the situation to advocate to the university, to create the programs that they need to help survivors. So I think that is a really important first step. The university community, the faculty, the students — especially survivors — need to advocate for services to help survivors, and also to engage a broader university community in that conversation about prevention.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
