01 Feb McCain Institute, EVP National Competition Awards ODU Team First Place
A team of four Ohio Dominican University (ODU) Public Relations and Marketing Communications students has taken top honors in the McCain Institute for International Leadership and EdVenture Partners’ (EVP) “Invent2Prevent” national competition. ODU was among more than two dozen universities across the country represented by student teams who were asked to identify new whole-of-society approaches to targeted violence and terrorism prevention.
ODU’s team was comprised of Alexis Young ’21 from Columbus, Ohio; Vivian Nnachetam ’22 from Columbus, Ohio; Kylee Risinger-O’Malley ’21 from Orient, Ohio; and Jacqueline Neu ’22 from Canal Winchester, Ohio. The students and their adviser, ODU academic program director and assistant professor of Public Relations, Natalie Kompa, Ed.D., submitted their proposal in fall 2020.
ODU’s team was among three groups invited to present their proposals virtually on Jan. 29, 2021, to a panel of judges. That panel included Mark Green, executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership; former U.S. Senator from Arizona Jeff Flake; Nicholas Rasmussen, executive director of the Global Internet Forum for Counterterrorism; Vidhya Ramalingam, founder of Moonshot Countering Violent Extremism (CVE); and Jessica Stern, Ph.D., research professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. The final round of presentations is available to watch here.
Following the presentations, the panel selected the ODU team as having the winning proposal, awarding them the top prize of $5,000. The money will benefit ODU’s Public Relations Student Society of America chapter and its student-run public relations firm, 1911 PR, of which all the participating students are members.
The team’s proposal, “The All Together Human Project,” is a peer-to-peer training program that moves college students to action by empowering them to combat hate-based violence and hate speech against the LGBTQ+ community. The program takes campus resident assistants (RAs) and student leaders through a three-part training series designed to help college students experience the three C’s of being human: showing Compassion; seeking Connection; and Celebrating our differences. The RAs are trained to deliver short, 20-minute interactive sessions to residents through community programming.
“I was particularly struck by the honing in on the role that RAs can play and must play, and that I think offers great potential,” Green said after ODU was announced as taking top honors.
“We are so thrilled with the results of this competition,” Kompa said. “The focus on preventing hate speech and hate-based violence allowed the students to create something that can have a big impact in today’s world.”
This is the second national competition that a team of ODU PR students has won in recent years. In 2019, a team of seven students took first place in the EdVenture Partners and American Petroleum Institute’s “Educating Our Energy Future” national competition. During that competition, teams were asked to develop a public relations campaign that helps to raise awareness among America’s youth about the important roles that natural gas and oil play in everyday life.