Health and Wellness Services have recently introduced condom dispensers in bathrooms and student residential areas on campus to promote safe sex, increasing students’ access to contraceptives throughout campus.
Through a partnership with the San Antonio AIDS Foundation, Health Services and Wellness Services have come together for this project. Acrylic dispensers with free condoms are now located throughout campus. The peer health educator team from Wellness Services plans to resupply these dispensers over the next few months.
Marlaina Widmann, assistant director of Wellness Services, has overseen the peer health educator team amidst this new initiative. The current project is based on existing data, and peer health educators will continue tracking statistics of condom usage at Trinity. Alongside her, Marcy Youngdahl, director of Integrated Counseling & Health Services, has supervised this project and collaboration, looking to build upon prior resources Trinity offered.
“From our NCAA National College Health Care Health Assessment, which is the survey that we administered last spring, we learned that students are using condoms, which is great. And so we wanted to really increase access to free condoms on campus,” Youngdahl said.
The San Antonio AIDS Foundation began working with Health Services in the fall of 2022. The organization has aided in promoting sexual health through monthly visits at Trinity, providing free STI testing on the first Tuesday of every month. They will further increase their aid in the condom initiative, regularly providing more condoms for these dispensers.
“Previous to this, the condoms were available at Health Services, but that was pretty much it,” Youngdahl said. “And some residential services, like [Resident Assistants] would have condoms available to students. But we felt like that really wasn’t giving students access.”
Along with more widespread access to condoms, Wellness Services and the peer health educator team continue to provide education surrounding safe sexual health. Wellness Services aims to create an informed community by tabling each Wednesday to educate the campus on different topics and directly teach all new members of fraternity and sorority life about healthy relationships.
“We wanted to make sure that everybody who wanted to practice safer sex was able to easily access safer sex supplies,” Widmann said. “Condoms are 90% effective with perfect use, but only 87% effective with typical use. And so when everybody follows all the steps, they can actually be effective with using the condoms.”
Given the relatively new nature of this project, statistics on how much students are using these dispensers remain to be seen. However, the peer health educators who are in charge of resupplying these areas have seen positive results. Anusha Sharma, junior neuroscience and psychology double-major, works as a peer health educator and expresses high hopes for the future this project may bring.
“We haven’t had the stations out for very long, but even in the past two weeks, we have come across stations that are completely empty and need to be refilled, which I think is a great step towards making people feel comfortable enough to grab what they need,” Sharma said. “Personally, I hope that this initiative will make conversations about safer sex less taboo and allow students to have conversations they deem necessary in order to have the most positive experiences possible.”
