grit lacrosse

One Love Foundation

One Love Foundation

At GRIT Lacrosse we are proud active supporters of the One Love Foundation and their mission to ensure that everyone understands the difference between a healthy and unhealthy relationship.

The One Love Story

One Love exists for one reason - Yeardley Love was killed and her death was avoidable if anyone, including Yeardley, had understood the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationship behaviors. One Love was founded in 2010 after Yeardley, a senior at the University of Virginia, was killed by her ex-boyfriend.  After her death, Yeardley’s friends and family were stunned to learn that 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men will be in an abusive relationship in their lifetime.  Young women ages 16-24 are at 3X greater risk and have limited awareness of that fact. Today, we work to ensure that everyone has information about unhealthy and abusive relationships that Yeardley, her friends and her family did not. We want everyone to understand the danger in these types of relationships and empower them to leave an unhealthy situation—or help a friend leave—before it escalates to abuse.

Our Approach

One Love’s educational approach starts with the creation of emotionally compelling, film-based content that opens people’s eyes to the presence of unhealthy and abusive behaviors in their lives. This content sparks conversations unlike others that have taken place before and gives people guideposts on how to talk about unhealthy and healthy relationships. In opening people’s eyes and sparking conversations, we are establishing stigma around abuse that we believe is the first ingredient in changing the horrible statistics.

Newly awoken and motivated to help others, individuals on campuses and in communities around the country are raising their hand and giving their time, energy and resources toward the movement by joining Team One Love. This decision to participate and desire to help in whatever way —no matter how big or small—is the key to moving from educating to movement-building to social change.

ESCALATION WORKSHOP

  • The Escalation Workshop is a 90-minute, film-based experience that educates about the warning signs of an abusive relationship, creating a safe zone for discussing an all-too-common problem. Over 150,000 students have seen Escalation at over 2,900 unique workshops. The workshop is consistently cited as “relatable” and “eye-opening” by students. Here’s what to expect:
  • The film, Escalation, introduces us to Page and Chase, a college-aged couple whose relationship starts exciting and fun, but ends in tragedy. The film enables students to understand the more nuanced signs of relationship abuse as well as how important it is for friends to step in if they see these behaviors.
  • Following the film, the audience breaks into small discussion groups led by One Love trained facilitators to discuss key scenes from the film. Groups talk about the warning signs, actions that could have been taken, and how the film relates to their own lives.
  • In the last 10 minutes, students can join Team One Love where they will be provided with additional messaging around healthy and unhealthy relationships as well as receive activation ideas they can bring back to their friends and campus community.

#THATSNOTLOVE CAMPAIGN

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The discussion about healthy and unhealthy relationships has also been brought online through the #ThatsNotLove campaign. The six chapters of One Love’s #ThatsNotLove campaign have been viewed a combined 60 million times. #ThatsNotLove is a series that seeks to define the gray area between love and control. The campaign was intentionally designed and named to allow people to use the phrase, “That’s Not Love!” when they see friends in an unhealthy or abusive relationship. We have created five discussion guides for chapters that can be used as a continuous educational opportunity throughout the year.

TEAM ONE LOVE

After the workshop, students are prompted to join Team One Love—a community of over 15,000 people nationwide excited to carry the torch around this issue in their communities. Whether a student joins Team One Love individually and/or starts an official club or group on campus, One Love provides them with access to One Love staff mentors, continuous messaging about healthy and unhealthy relationships, and ideas on how they can continue to educate and empower others in the community around relationship abuse.

GRIT AND ONE LOVE PARTNERSHIP

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Educating Grit players, coaches and parents about healthy relationships is critical to changing behaviors off the field. One Love programs will provide all members of a young athlete’s life with the tools to support that young person in learning to foster their own and their friends’ healthy relationships. It will give them the knowledge, language and resources to spot and address unhealthy relationship behaviors in the students they engage with every day.

 

  •  Our ninety-minute, research-based Escalation Workshop is a critical part of our campaign to change the conversation around healthy and unhealthy relationship behaviors as a way of altering the pipeline that leads to abuse.
  • #ThatsNotLove discussion guides provide additional content and conversation through powerful short videos. These can be used as a follow up option after Escalation.
  • Timeline proposal: Start with Escalation (for the older students) and, for every month after, use one #ThatsNotLove video and discussion guide to continue the conversation. For younger students, start with the #ThatsNotLove Couplets discussion guide and discuss one behavior in the guide each month.
  • By engaging the GRIT community in a discussion on how to (1) identify the difference between healthy and unhealthy behaviors, (2) know how to intervene when they see unhealthy behaviors in their lives, and (3) develop and build healthier relationships, we are empowering individuals to lead and are emboldening the community as a whole through a common set of information and values.

Engage athletes in a conversation about how this topic and content is most relevant in their lives, and how One Love can best support them to further the conversation in their communities. This could range from:

  • Encouraging students to bring One Love programming and Team One Love clubs to their high schools or middle schools
  • Empowering students to join One Love’s national Campus Ambassador internship
  • Leading fundraising and planning efforts for the Dallas One Love Lacrosse Tournament

In Spring 2015, Molly Ford – one of Yeardley’s childhood friends – and other members of the Dallas lacrosse community went the extra yard by organizing the first Dallas One Love Lacrosse Tournament, in which 8 high school teams participated to raise awareness for the Foundation. In 2016, the tournament expanded to 14 teams and incorporated an educational component by encouraging teams to participate in our Escalation Workshop.

To continue to build on this momentum, One Love will work with Grit to:

  • Set up a committee with parents and students to plan logistics
  • Set a fundraising goal for the event
  • One Love will help find sponsors for the event

Over 483 million yards have been run to date in just under 3 years. Grit can participate in this campaign in the following ways:

Continue to have teams track their yards toward the campaign during practices or pre-season training
Use Yards for Yeardley as an opportunity to do a community event or as part of the Lacrosse tournament.

GRIT parents can:

  • Volunteer for the Lacrosse Tournament
  • Participate in a Dallas Lip Sync for Love fundraiser
  • Lead parent Escalation Discussions or in-home screenings