During the first year, the Task Force invited prospective collaborators, organized how we’d like to meet and work together, and identified our goals, mission, and objectives. Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams, Skye Ashton Kantola, and Jody Powers served as the executive leadership team. During this time the group determine that we would develop an Education Subcommittee to create an educational campaign about violence prevention among people with disabilities, a policy subcommittee that would identify and illustrate the reporting systems in Indiana available to survivors with disabilities and develop an organizational assessment tool for disability agencies, and a Data Subcommittee that would develop a needs assessment for people with disabilities in Indiana.
By the end of the grant year, the Education subcommittee had taken over the reporting infographic task and had begun collecting the information necessary from various state level disability agencies. The Policy subcommittee had created an initial rough draft of the Organizational Assessment Tool that was ready to be piloted by two collaborative organizations. The Data subcommittee had finished a rough draft of the community needs assessment survey.
MESA and ICADV also both applied for Rape Prevention Education grant funding for the 2019 grant year and were both awarded funds for the Task Force work.