After spending a portion of my last summer as a research assistant with the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Family Violence Research Center, coming back to work with many of the same brilliant
Rob Blanchard Photo UNB
individuals with the RAVE Project was an absolute pleasure, but also a great challenge. As the social media consultant, my main duties were to update the RAVE Project social media pages (such as Facebook and Twitter), performing maintenance on the official website, organizing blog post schedules, and gathering analytics of social media performance and website traffic. This combination of work was a very interesting new experience for me, as was learning about all of the different aspects of the RAVE Project and what we do. One of the most astounding parts of this position was getting a firsthand view of the amazing foundation that this project was built on, and how much time and dedication went into making the RAVE Project a beacon of light for victims of violence.
Whilst working with RAVE, there were two experiences that really stuck out to me as incredibly memorable. Firstly, I took a personal trip to Kingswood University in Sussex New Brunswick to visit a friend of mine, and being a Christian school, I got the opportunity to speak with a few of the leaders there. Since I was working with RAVE at the time, I started talking about what the mission of the project is and mentioned certain aspects such as trying to train head members of churches how to properly direct someone to support systems and transition houses. He and I ended up having a very long conversation about the ethics of the church community and how the RAVE Project is implementing many incredible ideas into the community, and commended that I chose this position to follow. Secondly, as social media consultant, I dealt with a lot of incoming messages we would receive. One of which was a woman from Trinidad that took notice to RAVE and began conversing with us about potential collaborative opportunities. It was an incredible feeling to see firsthand how far an idea like RAVE can spread around the world, and how social media has truly become such a global connection and really felt like the work I was doing was making an impact.
With my time at RAVE coming to an end, I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who entrusted me with this position, and for the wonderful people who created and continue to strengthen this project and everything it represents. My experience here has been incredible, and I will be certainly keeping up to date with all of its future endeavours and the incredible things that RAVE will continue to accomplish.
Mitch Rayner
May 1st, 2018