Active* Consent Toolkit: Developing a Consent Strategy for your Higher Education Institution.
Click to download the Toolkit
Active* Consent created this cutting edge toolkit to meet the needs of a wide coalition across our staff and student stakeholders in Higher Education Institution (HEI) who work to make positive changes on consent, sexual violence and harassment.
This toolkit serves:
- University staff and administrators, encompassing academic and support staff as well as university management.
- Student representatives working with their Students' Unions, Societies and Sports Clubs, or on behalf of their academic disciplines.
- The wider community including external stakeholders such as the rape crisis movement, advocacy groups, and post-primary education.
Active* Consent's toolkit answers two immediate needs for these groups in line with Minister Harris's present aims in this area:
- Guidance on how to support your HEI's Action Plan to tackle sexual violence and harassment, as well as addressing consent education through a sustainable and joined up strategy across your campus community
- Access to expanded resources and research from the Active* Consent Programme to use as part of your HEI's Action Plan - including a new three-stage consent education programme that can be delivered online, and which applies the findings of the recent Active* Consent/Union of Students in Ireland Sexual Experiences Survey into significant opportunities for learning and culture change.
Users will gain a broad introduction to what they need to know about the Consent Framework and drafting your HEI's Action Plan, an in-depth look at Active* Consent's 2020-2021 programming, as well as an introduction to our latest research findings and unique vision for consent education.
The toolkit is a resource for continuing development for those who have engaged with our programming in the past, particularly the 400+ staff and students trained nationally to deliver our Active* (formerly SMART) Consent workshop. It also supports further learning of people who have engaged in training in other sectors, including the opportunity to explore the connection between our work in colleges and the need for consent education in the post-primary sector and other areas of society.
Users can read this toolkit straight through or jump between sections to find out what they need to know about the wider HEI context in which Active* Consent works, or how they might interact with our resources or those of our colleagues in their community.
There are also general information sections that anyone can use to direct students/peers to local resources, familiarise themselves with our key Active* Consent research findings, or that someone might make use of as handouts to introduce key consent definitions and concepts to others quickly as they advocate for the Consent Framework's ongoing sustainability within and across your institution.
The toolkit draws on our extensive experience and expertise in research, consent education, and multi-disciplinary programming to present Active* Consent's unique research base and vision for youth and staff engagement in a usable format accessible across multiple audiences. It is a living document, appropriate to our current needs for action on student and staff experiences of sexual violence and harassment. It demonstrates the commitment of our team to contribute to the national effort to achieve and sustain the innovative, compelling vision of the Consent Framework across our HEI institutions. The toolkit will be updated on an ongoing basis, just as college Action Plans evolve over time with increasing sectoral capacity to protect the safety and promote the well-being of our students and staff.