MASS rights for Changge/Office on Violence Against Women (OVW)
The MASS Rights for Change/OVW Grant team continued to be busy following a successful webinar presentation hosted by the VERA Institute in late July. We will be continuing to make our Survivor Support Packet more accessible for everyone. You can find it now, including our self-care videos, on our
website.
During August and continuing into September, the MASS team gave feedback to the Victim Rights Law Center on making some of their great, graphic information sheets more accessible. We are also working on a peer-to-peer advocate training booklet to be able to provide better support to victims of abuse.
Thank you to John Mullaly, Pauline Bosma, and Brian Kelly, as well as all of the supporters on the team, for your commitment to the work of helping survivors of abuse!
Stay tuned, because our MASS team and our partners, Pathways for Change and Victim Rights Law Center, have also come up with other great ideas and useful tools that we can offer in the future, to make services more accessible for sexual abuse survivors with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
R Cubed (R3)
Our MASS R3 team of consultant John Mullaly, Brian Kelly, and Melissa Beauregard, has been hard at work over the past few months. We continue to make progress in developing our R3 app which is designed to help individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) more readily recognize, report, and respond to abuse and neglect.
Back in June, the consultant team completed the process of creating structured lessons for the R3 app based on the existing Awareness and Action (A&A) training developed by the Disabled Persons Protection Commission (DPPC). By breaking down the existing training into smaller structured lessons, the team hopes to make the content more accessible and easier to understand.
The team would like to especially thank Sierra Weiss who helped us organize and compile the lesson materials.
During the months of July and August, our team has also begun a new pilot study based on the latest version of our R3 app. Our goal in this latest study is to get additional feedback on the R3 app from persons with IDD.
The pool of participants for this study includes individuals who have previously taken the A&A training as well as those who have not. We hope that this study will give us valuable information as we continue to improve the R3 app.
Our team would like to thank our partners DPPC and DDS as well as Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and the University of Rhode Island (URI) for their continued collaboration on the R3 project.
