If you’ve only been to Searle Hall to kick frat flu or get a Covid test, you’ve likely never seen beyond its first floor.
Housed on the second floor is CAPS, or Northwestern’s Counseling and Psychological Services.
But walk up to the third floor, and you’ll be greeted with baskets of free condoms and menstrual products, a smattering of bright flyers advertising campus meditation spaces and substance use recovery resources, dinosaur posters captioned “Make sexual assault extinct,” and a comfy lounge across from a door labeled “Sensory Room.”
These are the offices for a campus acronym many students haven’t even heard of: C-S-A-W, or “seesaw,” which stands for the Center for Student Advocacy and Wellness.
CARRIE COX WACHTER: When you look at all the types of programming that we offer, they naturally reach so many different pockets of folks.
That’s Carrie Cox Wachter. She’s the director of CSAW, which was just titled this year, but is a merger of two former services for Northwestern students.
The Center for Awareness, Response, and Education — or CARE — was one of them. This office worked with students affected by relational and sexual violence.
WACHTER: With CARE, for example, we want to say right, that it’s going to reach everybody, but it’s going to reach those folks that want to reach us, right?
The second service, HPaW, stood for Health Promotion and Wellness. This program focused on health and wellness education, plus drug and alcohol harm reduction.
So, why combine them?
WACHTER: We’ve always been co-located, and we share an admin. So when you ask, like, how big the teams are, there’s always an admin that was like, half CARE, half HPaW, and just really in that space. But the kind of, the really, it came out of this idea of, like, could we put these offices together and really think holistically about all of these services?
Wachter says she’s happy with how smoothly CSAW has combined the different missions and programming into one. But, she also says she’s worried, particularly for survivors of interpersonal violence.
WACHTER: When we compare some of our numbers from this year to last year, there’s a little bit of a dip, a little bit of a difference, and that very rarely happens.
According to Wachter, that dip doesn’t mean that less students need these services. More worryingly, it could mean that students who do, don’t know they exist under the new CSAW name.
WACHTER: I just don’t want to see that dip. I want folks to know that we’re here. I mean, they don’t have to, obviously, utilize our services. But that does worry me.
For Wachter, though, monitoring CSAW’s impact doesn’t just come down to website hits.
WACHTER: I don’t feel like success is around the numbers, right? Of course, I’m talking about like visibility, and I want more people to know we’re here, but it’s really more about the impact that we make. Like, even if, like, we have a program that put a lot of effort into and not a ton of people will show up, if we’ve made a solid impact, if we’ve made a difference in that few folks’ lives, and they go and talk about how to be bystander intervention, or how to utilize mindfulness in their work, or how to intervene in alcohol emergencies, that is success: getting our messages out to the folks that maybe wouldn’t normally get it.
But even by the numbers, I’ve witnessed that impact—and even seen it increase. Max Carey is a health promotion specialist at CSAW. Last year, I was one of two students in a training he led on how to recognize signs of an opioid overdose and administer the life-saving medicine naloxone, also known as Narcan. This year, there were ten other students in my session, which is offered several times per quarter.
MAX CAREY: I certainly think there is a bit of that perception of like, ‘Oh, do I really need to do this?’ Or is like, ‘Is it super important?’ I think I would say, in response to that, is that you never really know when these things are going to happen. It’s all meant to be preventative, which is kind of like that angle of sort of public health in general, kind of working more on the prevention versus like treatment after something were to happen. And just that it can really happen to anyone of any age. It does not discriminate based on those factors at all. And I think it’s just sort of kind of getting at the idea of that everyone sort of has, like, a social commitment to, like, make sure each other are safe. And we want to really reinforce that here.
Carey says the trainings are part of CSAW’s mission to create a “safer and more caring campus community.”
CAREY: Yeah, and it’s not even like just for like, their fellow students or staff or faculty. It’s also even like, just generally, how to recognize it, say, that they’re somewhere downtown Chicago — it’s to recognize signs and symptoms if someone were suffering from it from there. So, seeing it in just even the greater community.
Three students I spoke with after our Narcan training had never been to the third floor of Searle, and only one already knew about CSAW. But, each armed with a box of Narcan and looking at the various freebies and posters around the room, they expressed the same sentiment: it felt good to feel supported and prepared.
Here’s McCormick senior Lochlan McGinnis:
LOCHLAN MCGINNIS: It’s hard being a student. You’re a young adult, you don’t really know how to manage a lot of things, whether it’s your new experiences, your emotions, your friends, family, all that gets amplified, especially in a competitive college like Northwestern, where everyone always seems like they’re, you know, going full stop all the time. So I think it’s important to be able to stop, slow down a bit. And I appreciate the resources around us that help us do that.
For Wachter, that’s exactly what CSAW success looks like now.
To learn more about how CSAW can support you, visit the 3rd floor of Searle Hall or look up northwestern.edu/csaw.
For WNUR News, I’m Georgia Kerrigan.