Press Mentions

Looking to use her legal expertise to fight domestic violence, attorney Stephanie Nilva ’88 in 2003 launched the nonprofit organization Day One, which serves young people in New York City. She’s been its executive director since the beginning.

Too often, people equate dating abuse or domestic violence with physical altercations. Abuse can also be verbal, emotional, financial, or technological. Coercion, harassment, manipulation and stalking behaviors are frequently present when one partner is abusive. Relationships can be very unhealthy and unsafe, even when there is no physical violence.

If you’re like most people who attended public school in the United States, sex education evokes memories of being separated into boys and girls, giggling as instructors slipped condoms over bananas and flipped through highly detailed anatomical diagrams. Thankfully, you may have thought, it was over after one or two days.

In each 45-minute workshop, teens learn about “consent” vs. “coercion” — concrete terms that help them to frame their life experiences. “If somebody asks you out five times and you say no four times and on the fifth time you said yes, is that consent? We’ll have lively discussions about that,” Day One Social Work Supervisor Rebecca Stahl told NationSwell. “We don’t try to come into those conversations with answers. It helps young people form a critical analysis of the relationships they see in the media, in school, modeled by their parents and modeled by their peers.”

Day One’s Executive Director Stephanie Nilva recently sat down with Jay Dow of Pix 11 news to talk about dating violence, Day One’s work, and what local resources are available. Check it out here.

Nonprofit updates from across New York. Day One raised $300,000 at an April 17 event in Manhattan. The event commemorated the sexual assault-fighting nonprofit’s 15th anniversary and honored filmmaker Abigail Disney, according to an April 25 press release. MSNBC political analyst Zerlina Maxwell, a rape survivor who created the #RapeCultureIsWhen hashtag, also attended the event.