One of the objectives of Micah's Place is prevention and to achieve that goal, we provide programs to increase awareness and educate the community.
PROFESSIONAL TRAINING: Micah's Place staff offers professional instruction to law enforcement, judicial agencies, mental health professionals, and other professionals and paraprofessionals throughout the community.
COMMUNITY EDUCATION: Trained staff and volunteers schedule presentations for churches, civic groups, colleges, other non profits and professional groups upon request. Micah's Place "Violence in the Work Place" presentation helps business managers and staff better identify those who need help (including fellow employees or customers,) appropriate ways to address the problem, safety programs and resources. SCHOOL PROGRAMS: The Micah's Place Youth Advocate has worked with the Nassau County School Board for approval to implement programs developed for violence prevention and designed specifically for students.
Each year since 2005, Micah's Place has provided a two-day dating violence awareness program to all high schools in Nassau County, the Dating Violence Education and Prevention program. The purpose is to teach the dangers of dating violence to ninth graders. By educating students about these matters, they will be empowered to make better decisions in selecting dating partners and also help their friends.
There is a focus on defining dating violence, early warning signs, and the characteristics of healthy and unhealthy relationships. Other issues included are personal safety, helping friends in dating violence situations, and potential reasons why people often stay in unhealthy relationships. The students are encouraged to be actively involved with activities, and to ask questions.
At the end of the presentation, students are asked to write down any further questions they may have about dating violence or, if they have no questions, to write any question, such as "what is your favorite football team?" This has been a very effective method of answering questions some may feel uncomfortable asking. Sadly, this also has helped to expose how often our students find themselves or someone close to them in an unhealthy relationship.
While presenting the Dating Violence program to freshman students, it became obvious that the program was serving as an intervention program rather than the originally intended prevention effort. So, Micah's Place again obtained approval from the School Board for permission to target sixth graders with a newly developed program. Although the middle school and high school programs' objectives and themes are very similar, they do not duplicate each other. The middle school program is a two-day healthy relationship program which encompasses definitions of bullying, healthy and unhealthy relationship behaviors, personal safety, and the consequences of abusive behavior. Relationships discussed will include friends, family members or boyfriends/girlfriends.
The program is as interactive as possible with many different types of media and activities to capture and hold students' attention. Students participate in a skit which outlines a story involving different aspects of unhealthy relationships. Another skit has students participate as judge, jury or the District Attorney' prosecution team. The judge decides who should be on trial and the jury decides what each person's punishment should be. This program is also intended to effectively prepare students for our high school programs.
2007/2008 Micah's Place School Programs through the support of: Players Championship Charities Rayonier Target