Service boasting safety on campus also offers workshops to students.
If you’ve ever felt uneasy around campus alone at night, you’re not alone.
For more than 20 years, the Student Association’s (SA) SafeWalk service has offered the George Brown College (GBC) community a sense of safety and community.
And why wouldn’t those visiting or leaving campus feel safe, when trained members of the SafeWalk team are on hand at all major campuses to walk anyone around campus – or within a two-kilometre radius. The service is free and available not only to students, but to staff, and visitors to the college as well.
Over the years, the service has expanded their offerings to not only help you feel safe, but to raise students’ awareness and knowledge of safety.
Chris Yalousakis, coordinator with SafeWalk, says this year the service will continue to provide students with the safety and reliability that has made the service a staple on campus. However, he says there’s a lot more training offerings on the way for students – including some new ones never offered by SafeWalk before.
“So, we’re going to actually have more trainings, different trainings, and just an incredible array of trainings that we’re going to have. As always, we’re going to have first aid training, standard first aid training, understanding and managing aggressive behavior training, which is what we’ve always had for quite a while,” said Yalousakis. “The self-defense for women training has been upgraded from a workshop to a training. So, it’s a full day and it’s, it’s, we got a lot of feedback for it that it should be a full day and or, you know, just expanded, because three hours, the way that we had it was just not enough. Everything we had, from all the feedback that we had for this workshop, was fantastic. Just absolutely empowering, just they wanted more time, and we’re gonna allow them to have more time. So, it’s a full day on a Saturday, October 25.”
In addition to expanding the self defense workshop, SafeWalk will also be introducing Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST), in addition to SafeTALK training. Both are offered in partnership with the Canadian Mental Health Association.
“It’s two full days, and it’s an amazing training that it basically teaches someone how to recognize people who have thoughts of suicide, etc. It will have more information on that, though, but it is absolutely critical, especially with mental health issues all around the campus. We want to make sure that people are people are there basically. But if you’re not able to do the two days, we also have something called SafeTALK. And we’re not doing the training, but we’re going to be having somebody else come in. It’s an established training. The same people who are doing the ASIST training, the suicide intervention training, are going to be doing SafeTALK, and it’s a four-hour training,” he added.
With all the extra trainings being added – and some of their regular CPR trainings selling out within a few hours – Yalousakis notes that this year, SafeWalk will be asking students who register for a training, to pay a refundable $20 deposit. He says students will have their deposit returned to them when they attend the trainings for which they register, however, if a student fails to attend the training, they will forfeit the deposit.
Last year, SafeWalk completed over 1,000 escorted walks and helped more than 5,000 people with directions or questions.
This year, SafeWalk will be available at the following locations:
Casa Loma: 6:45 to 10:30 p.m.
St. James: 6:45 to 10:30 p.m.
Waterfront: 6:45 to 10 p.m.
Hospitality: 6:45 to 10:30 p.m.
Theatre School – By request.
To book a walk, you can contact SafeWalk at 1-888-210-7233 (Call, text or WhatsApp), or book online by visiting their website at studentassociation.ca/safewalk.
