Responsible RPI is RPI’s campus-wide framework for harm reduction, healthy decision-making and student flourishing. Evidence- and trauma-informed, Responsible RPI helps equip students with skills, support, and strategies to navigate decision-making in college and beyond. Using a holistic approach, Responsible RPI collaborates with various campus partners to engage students in conversations around alcohol and other drugs, healthy relationships, hazing, interpersonal violence, sexual health, sexual violence, bystander intervention and emotional regulation.
We focus on 3 Domains:
By exploring the relationship someone has with themself, students understand and learn how to regulate their internal experiences by developing insight into emotional patterns, coping behaviors, and identity formation. This helps students build a strong sense of self-awareness; a cornerstone of responsible, values-aligned action. Programming around the relationship with self includes:
- Self-assessment of substance use
- Building emotional regulation skills
- Addressing loneliness
- Understanding the impact of stress
- Exploration of personal values
- Building confidence in personal identity and decision making.
Exploring one-to-one relationships and group connections, students learn ways to identify healthy and unhealthy relations and explore how to navigate relational dynamics related to power, conflict, and disagreement with care, equity, and integrity. Programming around one-to-one relationships and small groups includes
- Hazing identification and prevention
- Building respectful and emotionally safe relationships
- Learning communication skills, boundaries, and conflict management
- Cultivating emotional intimacy in romantic, sexual, platonic, and other relationships
- Navigating loneliness and belonging
- Practicing safer sex and sexual health hygiene
- Communicating affirmative consent
- Identifying and seeking support for sexual & relationship violence
Relationship with Community supports students in understanding how broader systems, cultures, and narratives shape individual and group relationships and campus life. Opportunities in this area challenge harmful norms and assumptions while building collective responsibility through voice and community. Programming around relationship with community looks like:
- Bystander Intervention trainings
- Narcan Trainings with the Rensselaer County Department of Health
- Mental Health First Aid with RecWell at the Mueller Center
- Exploration of stigma, stereotypes, and cultural narratives that impede belonging and success.
Responsible RPI hosts programming open to the campus community each semester. To view our programming calendar and get the latest updates (click here) or follow us on Instagram at @doso_rpi
