SafetyWalk Opens With Revised Hours

SafetyWalk reopened last night with revised hours of operation and new efforts to increase the program's campus-wide visibility.

Student volunteers for the program escort students from location to location late at night. The Harvard University Police Department sponsors the service.

Program organizers said they feel that SafetyWalk has been a resource too many undergraduates fail to recognize.

As a result, this year's director, Laura D. Babkes '02, has changed the program's hours of operation to a range she said will better serve students' needs.

In past years, coed teams of "SafetyWalkers" have been on call between 12 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Sunday through Thursday evenings.

As part of Babkes' plan to increase student usage of SafetyWalk, those hours have been changed to 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.

"We really just felt that not many people were using [SafetyWalk] that late so we made it earlier so that more people will use it," Babkes said.

Not everyone is confident that the new hours represent the best way to secure that level of visibility. While acknowledging the difficulty in getting students to fill the 2 to 4 a.m. shifts, 1998 SafetyWalk Director Randolph Bell '00 worried that the time change will actually decrease the number of students who rely upon the service.

Bell said during his tenure with the organization, "We got the most calls between two and four."

Student involvement is not a new concern for SafetyWalk. In the fall of 1997, the program was forced to take a semester hiatus due to lack volunteers.

This year, SafetyWalk is looking not only to attract participants but also to increase awareness that such a resource exists said John S. Neumann '01, last year's co-director.

"We can't just assume that people know about SafetyWalk," Neumann said.

In addition to the new hours, Neumann said the program is aiming to improve its response time by securing a central location in the Science Center.

In the past, calls were directed to cell phones carried by the program's walkers. Neumann said response times would be faster if volunteers waited for calls in a central, convenient location.

"Last year we had a lot of quad people and our response times were a little longer than we would have liked," Neumann said.

SafetyWalk hopes that the proposed move will also increase the program's visibility since a Science Center location would be close to Cabot library--making the program more accessible for students returning to their rooms from the library.

Ideally, Neumann said, the program will eventually become as ingrained in campus culture as service groups like Room 13 and Peer Contraceptive Counselors.

Lin A. Chin '02, a student eating lunch in Adams House Dining Hall yesterday, said there is still a stigma attached to the notion of calling other students to walk you home.

"There's of course the feeling of lameness...that I'm an adult and I can't walk myself home," Chin said.

It is this hesitance that SafetyWalk hopes to extinguish by making the program move visible.

Still, Babkes and the current crew feel confident that they're moving in the right direction.

In past years, "a lot of people didn't know about [SafetyWalk]" Babkes said. "A lot of people are looking at it more seriously now."