By DENISE ELAM
Reporter
(WARRENSBURG, Mo., digitalBURG) — The Green Dot gardens will be in full bloom next week as students campuswide will share their bystander intervention actions.

The University of Central Missouri’s Green Dot initiative will help promote bystander intervention and violence prevention during Earth week April 18-22 by creating a garden out of paper flower green dots. Students submitted the green dots during the month of March. Collection boxes were placed across campus encouraging people to share their bystander intervention actions.

“We had about 300 entries and about just over 200 were turned into flowers,” said Sara VanSteenbergen, interim Green Dot specialist. “We turned them into flowers by pasting the dot into the middle of a larger petal cutout, so it looks like the dot is inside the flower.”

The flowers were laminated and attached to paint sticks that will be placed near the statue between the Student Recreation and Wellness Center and the Administration Building. VanSteenbergen said the flowers are part of a bigger mission to spread awareness about Green Dot and bystander intervention.

“It works to empower a community to really take responsibility for the safety and positive experience of everyone involved and it does this through providing student, staff and faculty with options for intervention,” she said.

VanSteenbergen said Green Dot is also devoted to proactive prevention efforts to communicate that violence is not OK on campus and that it is everyone’s responsibility to do something about it.

Green Dot has a team of around 25 different staff members and graduate students that have participated in facilitator training. They are known as the Green Team and help coordinate events on campus and present Green Dot information to faculty and students.

Lauri Dusselier, the assistant director of UCM Violence and Substance Abuse Prevention, said the Green Team is available to talk to students and staff during classes and club meetings.

“It can be anywhere from a brief 15-minute conversation at a staff meeting or a longer 45-minute presentation either at a staff meeting, an academic class or a club meeting,” Dusselier said. “We want to do as many of those presentations to groups of students, faculty and staff across campus as possible.”

Students can also be nominated for Green Dot training. Nominations are made through UCM’s website.

“The approach that Green Dot uses is to train students who are social leaders in the bystander intervention techniques,” Dusselier said. “Since they’re social leaders, other students emulate their behavior… So if we find out who those popular students are and train them in intervening in potentially violent situations or harmful situations then when those popular students do those behaviors of intervening other students will emulate them.”

Dusselier said leaders from Whiteman Air Force Base have attended training to implement Green Dot. She said Green Dot has been collaborating with the base to help them prepare to give presentations to their own leadership groups.

“The Air Force has its own Green Dot program that is being implemented nationally,” Dusselier said. “It’s a little bit different from the college program though the principles of bystander intervention are the same.”

The UCM organization It’s On Us attended a Green Dot informational session. The organization’s members assisted Green Dot by encouraging people to fill out the paper green dots with bystander intervention actions.

Alec Majino, president of It’s On Us, said the organization shares the same goal as Green Dot and the Better Man’s Society: to make people want to help and educate each other.

“Green Dot is focused on looking at everybody else who is just watching everything go down,” Majino said. “People (who) are thinking, ‘Wow, that’s weird, but I’m sure someone else will do something,’ and saying, ‘No you have to do something.’”

To request a presentation or nominate a student to be trained by Green Dot, visit ucmo.edu/greendot.