Hamline University junior Elena Anderson has been named the recipient of the 2015 Newman Civic Fellow Award for the work she does with on and off campus organizations to prevent sexual violent and help those who have been affected by sexual violence.

“It’s definitely a way of being recognized for work that I don’t do for any type of recognition. It’s very humbling,” she said about winning the award.

According to the Hamline University webpage, the Newman Civic Fellow Award is presented through Campus Compact, a coalition of 1,200 colleges across the country dedicated to the promotion of civic engagement and recognizes student leaders who have proven their dedication to changing communities for the better.

While Anderson feels strongly about a number of issues, her focus is on sexual violence.

“I think sexual violence is really prevalent and more prevalent than most people want to talk about,” she says. “It’s also something that people are just kind of afraid to talk about I think, and if there are some people that are willing to push those conversations. . . that’s part of what will stop it.”

As part of the leadership of the Hamline group Students Preventing Sexual Violence,  Anderson works with students to raise awareness of sexual violence through discussions, service work, rallies, educational events, etc. She does research to gauge the sexual violence climate here at Hamline, is a part of the Sexual Violence Prevention Task Force with faculty and staff who are concerned about the issue and a facilitator for Voice, a peer to peer support group for survivors on campus.

Anderson is also involved in a number of off campus facilities. As a part of the Sexual Offense Services of Ramsey County, Anderson volunteers as a sexual violence advocate for Ramsey County where she manages a crisis line. She is also the creator and instructor of the creative writing therapy program in the women’s unit of Ramsey County Correctional Facility which allows her to serve a group of survivors of domestic and sexual assault.

“Some of it’s preventative work and some of it is sort of, you know, how do you help someone after it’s already happened to them,” she says. “Right now I guess I’m still trying to find which sort of end I’m better or more useful on. Right now I feel like I’m able to give a lot to both.”

Anderson believes historically most of the activism around sexual violence has been focused on treating those who have been affected by it, but that there has been a shift towards preventing sexual violence. She says this is important because it breaks down the idea that this is how it is and how it has to be.

In the future Anderson hopes to use her degrees in social justice and creative writing to help others.

“My goal has sort of always been to make a career of teaching writing in prison,” she says. She wants to be able to combine social justice with writing and to find more ways to use writing as a healing power.

Anderson says the education she has received at Hamline has infinitely helped her in her service work. Half of her connections have come from classes she has taken and has received a lot of support and positive influence from her professors. In particular, her women’s studies classes have provided her a myriad of opportunities, but overall she says all her classes have positively affected her.

“Things actually do change and they can change when people try to make them change. I think people actually have the ability to make things happen if they just put their hearts to it,” she says of students’ abilities to evoke change in their communities. Her advice to those who want to be more involved in their communities is to find where you fit in and to know that what you do can have a positive result.

“[A]lways believe that you actually can have an impact,” she says.