Resilience: Interview With Kyra Jones
Kyra Jones is a former Resilience volunteer, filmmaker, artist, advocate and educator. She is currently the Assistant Director of Sexual Violence Response Services and Advocacy at Northwestern University. Resilience spoke with Kyra about her career in sexual violence prevention, the upcoming film she is writing, directing, and producing, and how she combines her passions for filmmaking and sexual assault advocacy.
What inspired you to get involved with Resilience?
I am an alumnus of Northwestern University, and I’m still working there now – they can’t get rid of me. For the full four years that I was at Northwestern, I was a member of a group called SHAPE which stands for Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators. That was really my introduction into sexual violence work as well as sex education. I started being more interested in talking about the sexual health aspects of that group, like sexual pleasure and making sure that my fellow peers have safe, consensual, fun sex. I felt like preventing sexual assault is important, but my bread and butter was the sexual health stuff. Then I unfortunately was sexually assaulted the end of my freshman year. With the ways that I had to try to navigate all of the systems that were supposed to be helping me, including the police and the hospitals and universities, I realized that they were not equipped to give me help in a way that I needed, and this really inspired me to be more active in the sexual violence prevention and advocacy end of the student group that I was in. We’d had a lot of interaction with Resilience. They would come and do trainings for us and events with us. They were one of our biggest collaborators. I now advise SHAPE. So, my senior year I was like I think I really want to consider doing this full time for a career or at least have it be a large part of my life going forward. So, then I started volunteering with Resilience. I did the full 60-hour training and was a medical volunteer for a year.
