Center for the Family institutes project designed to strengthen students’ relationships.
SHANNON URTKNOWSKI
Living Editor
Healthy relationships take work, and this year the Graduate School for Education and Psychology’s Center for the Family is opening its doors to students ready to commit themselves to the challenge.
The center, which primarily focused on off-campus marriages and family relations in the past, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. With the coming year, those involved with the center want to reach out to a broader group of individuals dealing with relationship issues.
The result: The Healthy Relationships Project, which was designed especially for college students and young adults. The initiative was started to help them learn to develop and maintain healthy relationships.
“Our overall goal is to do what we can to help students during the time they are at Pepperdine to develop relationship skills that will be beneficial to them in the series of relationships they are in now and well as the future,” said Dr. Dennis Lowe, professor of psychology at GSEP and the director for the Center of the Family.
The project will not only address how to maintain healthy romantic relationships but also relationships with family members, roommates, friends, co-workers and professors.
The Center for the Family tested the initiative in the fall and spring of 2006 with a limited offering of relationship-related convocations. Hannah Parmelee, the program assistant for the Center for the Family, said the response was so high that the Center for the Family wanted to launch a full-blown initiative.
“Last year we started on a really small scale,” Parmelee said. “We had an overwhelmingly positive response from the very first Convo. We filled up well before start time, and there were as many people outside [trying to get in] as there were inside.”
This year, the Healthy Relationships Project is broken into a relationship series of presentation convocations and club convocations.
Three presentation convocations are scheduled for various dates in October, and they will cover issues concerning how to put up with roommates, the power of friendship and grace-filled relationships. Ten club convocations are underway that cover similar topics.
Courtney Holmes, a second-year psychology student at GSEP, is running two of the club convocations, “Sexuality in the Media” and “Beyond the Disney Effect: Breaking Down Romanticized Love,” which is based off the Book of Ruth in the Bible.
She is serving as a relationship educator with four other graduate students, encouraged by Lowe.
“Dr. Lowe approached the five of us and said … he thought we would be good because we’re graduate students, so we can relate to [undergraduate students] better because they are more our age,” Holmes said.
Holmes has already gone through the first sessions of the club convocations, and she said she is excited about the openness and interest of her groups.
“I think so far the convocation classes are going very well, especially the Disney effect, because the girls are talking about how it applies in their own lives and bringing up things we hadn’t thought of,” Holmes said. “We gave them some ideas they haven’t thought of before, too, and I can tell they’re really starting to think about it.”
In addition to the convocations being offered, the Center for the Family also offers a number of resources online from which students can benefit.
The Web site, relationshipiq.net, offers an IQ test for determining individuals’ knowledge on healthy connections, articles on maintaining positive bonds and names of books that discuss topics about interactions with others. Students can also sign up for club convocations online, and people such as professors and RAs can request to schedule small group presentations by the relationship educators.
The Healthy Relationships Project is being sponsored by proceeds earned at SavvyChicII, an annual fashion auction held at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Parmelee said, with so much being put toward the Center for the Family’s relationship-building effort, she hopes students make the most of it.
“We hope students can take full advantage of the resources offered and we can be as helpful as possible to students developing good relations,” Parmelee said.
Lisa Moore, a psychology student at GSEP also working as a relationship educator, said she believes students who get involved with the project will be happy they did.
“Knowing how hard college can be, I truly believe this initiative will make a tremendous difference on campus,” Moore said. “The Center for the Family works to not only prepare [students] for college but to give them skills they can use throughout their lives.”
10-05-2006