Facilitating Change Beyond the Report and Support Platform: Culture Shift

Interview with Kenya Peters, the Product Marketing Manager at Culture Shift. Culture Shift is a real-time reporting platform to identify and prevent harassment and bullying. Peters started working in diversity and inclusion in marketing roles and wanted to start applying her marketing skills to an organisation doing this work full time, so started working at Culture Shift in 2021.

Location: Zoom (Manchester, England, UK and Canberra, Australia!)

Culture shift logo

The problem of sexual violence in universities is endemic and the Culture Shift Report and Support platform is a part of the solution. Their Report and Support is an online platform available to universities to utilise where staff, students and others can report bullying, harassment, discrimination and other issues. Culture Shift provides a platform and case management system that universities can purchase and embed within their institution in a way that meets their university context. On their standard Report and Support platform, they include articles for support about how people can identify what has happened to them, make sense of it, and how to seek support alongside or before engaging with the reporting process.

Many of the people working at Culture Shift have been involved in activism. They bring their diverse experiences to the work to make it more intersectional and therefore more impactful.

“We need a diverse team to make better solutions.”

When a person experiences some form of harassment, we can’t separate out the intersections of their experience - separating out different harms, such as racism and sexual assault, takes away from that individual’s experience. This is why the Report and Support platform is not specific to sexual violence, but can be used to report any type of misconduct including where multiple forms of harassment may have been present at one incident.

Peters and her team at Culture Shift advocate for the use of free text boxes so people can tell their story in ways that make most sense to them. Victim-survivors can share their story in their own words and make a decision about what characteristics came into play (such as different types of discrimination or behaviours they experienced) rather than making people tick boxes about their experience. People being able to report in their own words is very important.

“We build and provide a platform for people to be able to report, but we also influence how people use that data and platform to inform next steps for prevention and support.”

Culture Shift isn't just a response initiative, it also drives prevention and seeks to stop these behaviours from happening in the first place. One of their goals is to increase reporting. However, institutions need to build trust with their students and staff for this to happen. Some of the prevention work Culture Shift does is they build campaigns for universities to use. They also adapt to changing needs and language by updating the system to ensure it is accessible and accurately reflects the changing needs of the communities it serves. 

“We know we’ve done the best when we’ve got no job to do.”

Peters and I spoke about the importance of forming collectives and partnerships for greater change. She and her team at Culture Shift do a lot of work developing a community of practice where they organise monthly meetings and workshops to share new research, resources and have targeted discussions about emerging issues, with professionals working in misconduct and student support areas in higher education. This community of practice is open to anyone who uses their Report and Support platform. This invites people into the conversation to have discussions about all sorts of issues on campus to create positive change across the community.

“It’s nice to come into a space where people just get it and you don’t need to explain why it’s important.”

Culture Shift fosters a sense of community where people don't feel like they're doing this work alone. They work to remain trauma-informed with the professionals in their community of practice who support victim-survivors (acknowledging that many may be victim-survivors themselves) and to mitigate vicarious trauma, burnout and fatigue. Peters spoke about how it's important for an external organisation like Culture Shift to facilitate these discussions compared to a university, as it breaks down structural barriers and power dynamics and allows people to share their challenges more openly.

I asked Peters if they prepare institutions for an influx of reports when they adopt the Report and Support platform. I found it interesting that Peters answered that they don't have to, because universities don't tend to get an influx of reports due to the existing lack of trust they have with students. Instead, Culture Shift talks to their partners about setting up the platform for success, which includes raising awareness in campus communities of what the platform provides and what their reporting processes are. Peters also clarified that the concern isn’t that universities receive too many reports, but that they are under-resourced and unequipped to manage it.

“We instil hope.”

My journey across the USA, Canada and the UK has confirmed that there are a wide range of fantastic and impactful solutions to address sexual violence on campus. The problem in Australia is our lack of organisations thinking about these sorts of solutions in ways that are genuinely collaborative, feminist, trauma-informed and (in many cases) activist- and survivor-led.

I am honestly just so inspired by Kenya Peters' and her colleagues' work. We have so much to do in Australia and having a similar reporting system is certainly a step in the right direction.

In solidarity,

Camille Schloeffel

References / Learn more:

• https://culture-shift.co.uk/