Marta Miranda, director of the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs and the Women and Gender Studies Program at Eastern Kentucky University, has received a 2009 Sexual Assault Awareness Month Award.

The SAAMy Award, presented by the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs, honors individuals who have made exceptional contributions to Kentucky’s efforts to eliminate sexual victimization. Four recipients statewide were selected by a committee of victim service professionals from a pool of nominations submitted by Kentucky residents. Honorees were chosen based on their efforts that focused on sexual violence, the long-term impact of those efforts, the length of their commitment to ending sexual violence, and their collaboration with victim services programs. The recipients were honored at a ceremony at the State Capitol Feb. 26.

“This award means the world to me because it recognizes my clinical, service and activist work in the anti-violence movement,” Miranda said. “Seeing the end of intimate partner violence in my lifetime is my passion.”

Miranda, also a licensed social worker, has been actively engaged in ending sexual violence in Kentucky since 1996, when she joined the Bluegrass Rape Crisis Center as a psychotherapist. She has continued to work with BRCC as a clinical and organizational consultant and trainer, served as a consultant to the Cabinet for Health and Families Services and collaborated with the Kentucky Domestic Violence Association.

“Marta has been involved in the rape crisis movement since the beginning,” said Eileen Recktenwald, executive director of the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs.

For the past 10 years, Miranda has been an organizer and speaker for Take Back the Night marches on campus and in Lexington. As the director of EKU’s Women and Gender Studies Program, she has provided numerous workshops and presentations on violence prevention.

“I believe that men are crucial to stopping violence against women and girls,” Miranda said, “so I do a lot of speaking and recruitment with males about their role and responsibility in educating other men about this issue.”

In addition to numerous professional publications, she spearheaded the production of an acclaimed training video, “What You Should Know: The Cycle of Violence,” which was recently released for national distribution.

Recktenwald said that Miranda, because of her extensive ties to the state’s Hispanic community, “has influenced the cultural sensitivity of services for victims statewide.”

In 2004, Miranda was appointed to the Governor’s Task Force on Latino Issues in Kentucky and, two years later, received a National Best Practice Program Development Award for her design, implementation and evaluation of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services’ Language Access and Cultural Competency Program.

Recently, Miranda developed a broad coalition of campus and community partners to collaborate on a federal grant that would develop a bystander prevention program, based on the latest research recommendations for violence prevention.