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Stephen F. Austin State University’s Coordinated Community Response Team will host a number of free educational seminars and events beginning at 6 p.m. every Tuesday in October in recognition of Sexual Violence Awareness Month.

The events, held in the Baker Pattillo Student Center, will cover a range of topics, including bystander intervention and rape prevention, as well as a screening and discussion of “The Hunting Ground,” an award-winning documentary examining the incidence of sexual assault on college campuses.

“Dating violence and sexual assault are important topics that can’t be ignored,” said Dorothy Jackson-Tubbs, project coordinator of SFA’s Office of Violence Against Women. “Our goal at SFA is to provide education and empower our students to step in if they see something that doesn’t look right.”

Tubbs said these efforts are the result of a grant SFA received from the Department of Justice’s Office of Violence Against Women.

“Through the grant, we’ve been able to create a Coordinated Community Response Team whose goal is to improve services for victims, provide education for bystanders and increase safety for all students,” Tubbs said. “We plan to work diligently to ensure the SFA campus continues to be a safe place for students and our entire campus community.”

For more information on the seminars, as well as SFA’s Coordinated Community Response Team, please contact Tubbs at (936) 468-2133 or tubbsdj@sfasu.edu.

As she sat in the pew listening to the sermon, her ears suddenly perked up as the preacher shared an alarmingly high statistic about the number of orphans. This statistic made her mind spin with questions, thoughts and concerns.

“Having traveled abroad and seen vulnerable children situations in several countries and then beginning my studies at Stephen F. Austin State University, I was frustrated with the sermon’s information,” said Alisha Pangborn, a recent SFA graduate who studied early childhood education in the James I. Perkins College of Education.

While the preacher called for families to care for orphans, Pangborn knew, “The problem is much more complex than you take a kid, I’ll take a kid and then there will be no more orphans. The problem includes the children and families who are hurting or need support and opportunity.”

Pangborn’s experience working with orphans and children in vulnerable situations gave her a unique insight into the problem her preacher was discussing.

“I’ve been in some of those orphanages, and I know many of those ‘orphans’ don’t need adoption; they have families. Many of those families drop kids off at orphanages when things get tight and sometimes come and take them back later, sometimes not,” she said. “Also, many children who are not considered orphans are in severe need.”

Listening to the sermon gave Pangborn an idea. She began researching both the preacher’s statistics and the interpretations and stories behind them. It was while conducting that research she discovered an article by the Christian Alliance for Orphans titled “On Understanding Orphan Statistics.”

“I immediately knew I loved this organization and was thrilled to find they were looking for an intern,” Pangborn said.

She applied for an internship with the CAFO, an organization uniting more than 190 organizations and more than 650 church members to care for orphans and vulnerable children around the world.

“I wanted to be a part of the change in how we view and care for vulnerable children,” Pangborn said.

During her four-and-a-half-month internship, Pangborn worked as the applied research and best practice intern. In this role, she helped organize the CAFO Summit in Dallas that brought more than 2,000 foster and adoptive parents, orphan advocates, pastors and professionals together to explore effective foster care, adoption, family preservation and global orphan ministry. She helped coordinate invitations, literature and presenters.

“I was able to learn from some of the giants in the field of caring for vulnerable children,” Pangborn said. “All of these amazing people are affecting change for vulnerable children. Some are involved in international policymaking, some in brain research, some in day-to-day care research, but all are in one way or another focusing on vulnerable children.”

Additionally, Pangborn assisted in creating an electronic book as a support tool for the summit titled “The Changing Brain: Created to Heal.” This book is a resource used to explain the effects neuroplasticity — how the brain can change in reaction to the outside environment — has on orphans and vulnerable children.

“My SFA education gave me the research skills I needed to complete the book. It also gave me a deeper understanding and method for approaching challenging situations with children,” Pangborn said.

For Pangborn, the benefits of the internship were plentiful. She networked with leaders in the field, practiced her research skills and learned more about the issue at hand while also reaffirming her passion for orphaned and vulnerable children.

“It opened my eyes to a whole different area that I really didn’t realize existed,” Pangborn said. “Caring for vulnerable children goes far beyond their education or the social worker who might place them in foster care. There are people studying and improving our approach to care for children in ways I never imagined.”

By Kasi Dickerson, senior marketing communications specialist at Stephen F. Austin State University.

Christina Guenther and Ron Petti, faculty members in the Stephen F. Austin State University School of Music, will present the recital “Poems and Dragons” at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2, in Cole Concert Hall on the SFA campus as a feature of the SFA Friends of Music Concert Series.

Guenther, professor of flute, and Petti, professor and director of accompanying at SFA, will present a program of music by Charles Griffes, Jennifer Higdon, Eric Ewazen and Howard Buss – all American composers.

Griffes’ “Poem,” composed in 1918, is a one-movement flute concerto (to be accompanied by piano) that suggests Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” as a reference point, according to Guenther. The initial ascending rumble (in the piano) sets the scene for the flute and generates most of the piece’s melodic material, according to notes about the piece by Matthew Mugmon.

Flutist Jan Vinci co-commissioned Higdon’s “Flute Poetic” with Pola Baytelman, her colleague and Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Skidmore College, in celebration of Skidmore’s new Arthur Zankel Music Center. In the throws of composing her first opera, Higdon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, agreed to write an original first movement and an arrangement of two movements from her “String Poetic” for violin and piano, according to program notes. The work is a technical masterpiece requiring virtuosity of both players.

Pianist-composer Ewazen wrote “Sonata No. 1 for Flute and Piano” as a gift for flutist Marya Martin, with whom he had collaborated over the years in premieres, performances and recordings. He designed the three movements in the tradition of the late 19th century instrumental sonatas. The work was premiered at the 2011 National Flute Association Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, and features beautiful melodic lines as well as rhythmic drive.

Concluding the program, “Dragon Flight” by Buss is described as “a colorful and engaging work that evokes a fantasy world in which a dragon awakens and takes flight.” The audience will hear a dragon hissing and growling and the sound of soaring flight in the flute part, accompanied by a rhythmic and energetic ostinato in the piano, Guenther writes in the program notes.

Cole Concert Hall is located in the Tom and Peggy Wright Music Building, 2210 Alumni Drive.

Tickets are $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and $3 for students and youth. For tickets or more information, call the SFA Fine Arts Box Office at (936) 468-6407 or visit www.finearts.sfasu.edu.