Jessica is the Founder and Executive Director of Sexual Health Innovations, a nonprofit with the mission to “create technology that advances sexual health and wellbeing in the United States.” One of Jessica’s current initiatives is Callisto, a “third-party sexual assault reporting system designed to provide a more empowering, transparent, and confidential reporting experience for college sexual assault survivors … to facilitate the identification of repeat assailants.”
Transcript
>> My name is Jessica Ladd and I run a non profit called Sexual Health Innovations. And we build technology to advance sexual health and wellbeing in the United States. For a lot of our initiatives we focus on young people. They tend to be the most affected by various sexual health and wellbeing problems. So some individual websites, programs, etcetera, will be really aimed at their target demographic which tends to be, you know, people who are the most affected. My role is so many things. We're a really small non profit. There's just 3 of us full time. So I do a little bit of everything. I do a lot of fundraising, a lot of emails, a lot of the project management and any give website. A lot of the research. A lot of the legal stuff. And a lot of the making sure that whatever we're building is really solving the problem that it's designed to solve. Our main initiative right now is called Callisto and it's a sexual assault reporting system for college campuses, actually. It's a third party reporting system that sexual assault survivors can use to document what happened to them and then directly submit their report to the police or dean or the chosen entity or they can just save it so that they can use it at any other time in the future if they don't want to report right then. They can also elect to automatically report their -- a record of their assault if somebody else reports the same assailant which is where it gets really cool because 90 percent of campus assaults are committed by repeat assailants, but less than 10 percent are ever reported. So if we actually get people to use it and actually get them to opt in to that -- the matching part of it where if they submit a record and somebody else is assaulted by the same person and those people are stopped after their second assault we would prevent 60 percent of campus sexual assaults. So I'm a natural night owl. My schedule tends to be around ten thirty to seven thirty or eight, and then depending on the day I might work really late. I tend to be really productive between nine PM and one AM. So on Saturday night I was in the office until four thirty AM because we're starting a new campaign. Although most of the time I try to make sure that I protect my weekends and actually have a real social life.
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