Sure. Madam, thank you.
MVP—that's the acronym—was a program I created back in 1993 in Boston at the Center for the Study of Sport in Society, which is an institute that was created in 1984 with the idea of using sports culture as the platform or catalyst for social activism around various issues, including racism and other issues.
I was a graduate student in Boston at the time. My thought was if we could get more men who were athletes to speak out about rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence, it would open up space not just within the athletic subculture but in the larger culture that is influenced by the sports culture. We know how big sports are in Canada and the United States. My thinking was not that there was a particular problem in athletics of men assaulting women—although there was and is—it was the larger culture's problem and the positive role that athletics could play.
So we started the MVP program with the intent of engaging men in the sports culture. It moved beyond men and we started working with women as well, women and men in the sports culture. The goal was always to move beyond sports culture into the larger community, especially in education, in universities and high schools, and that's what we've done. MVP was the first bystander program, the first program that employed this approach that I referenced, which is instead of focusing on men as perpetrators or potential perpetrators, we focused on them as bystanders, friends, teammates, classmates, and it has grown from there.
The bystander approach that we started in MVP is now the mainstream of the prevention field in North America. So MVP still exists. I still run MVP and we still do training all over the place. We are running from one thing to the next in professional sports, and in college and university athletics. We've moved now into five countries around the world but most of our work historically has been in the States and now increasingly in Canada.