Eva Ball, the Center for Awareness, Response and Education’s sexual violence response services coordinator, will leave Northwestern after two years of working with sexual assault survivors on campus.

Ball, who was on leave this quarter, has worked at CARE to provide confidential services to survivors and advise them on responding to their assault. She resigned from Northwestern for family reasons, Lisa Currie, director of health promotion and wellness, announced in an email to the Campus Coalition on Sexual Violence last week. Her final day at the University is Friday.

Ball joined CARE in January 2012, after being hired as part of a grant NU received in 2011 from the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women. The grant, which supports sexual assault prevention and response programs on college campuses, also funded the establishment of CARE. Before CARE, Ball worked at Rape Victim Advocates in Chicago and represented the center on the Campus Coalition on Sexual Violence since the group’s inception in 2010.  

“As a representative to the CCSV from Rape Victim Advocates, she was a huge help in outlining what CARE would look like,” said Laura Stuart, coordinator of sexual health education and violence prevention. “(Ball) really advocated strongly to have survivor-centered services and to have it confidential.”

Stuart said Ball’s perspective of a building a community-based rape crisis center was instrumental in CARE’s creation and Stuart urged Ball to apply for the survivor advocate position at NU when the office was established.

“We’ve been really lucky to have her for two years … to help develop our first official sexual assault response protocol, do training for staff and faculty and student leaders on what to do when someone discloses (sexual assault), to help more than a hundred survivors that she has worked with over the years since she was here,” Stuart said.

While at NU, Ball also served on the Title IX Coordinating Committee, co-led the CCSV and helped to revise the University’s sexual misconduct policy, which was implemented in January. In the fall, she founded SPEAK for Change, a survivor activism group on campus.

“Eva has been a joy to work with and her vibrant presence will be truly missed in our office and on campus,” Currie wrote in the email.

Stuart said a search for Ball’s replacement has begun. The position was posted last Friday, and the University is assembling a search committee with the hopes of hiring someone before Fall Quarter.

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