1,400 views in 3 days.

I don’t think that, that number—despite the embarrassing number of times I have refreshed my Vimeo page—has sunk in yet.

Earlier today I was getting coffee on campus before class and I turned around in the coffee shop to see someone I have never met, watching WKU says NO MORE on their IPhone. The feeling of pride that overwhelmed me in that moment nearly brought me to tears.

WKU says NO MORE is a video that I made for a project in one of my journalism classes. I was inspired to make this video, which was filmed on the Western Kentucky University campus and included students and professors from WKU, by the NO MORE campaign and the NO MORE PSAs.

The instantaneous response to WKU says NO MORE has been incredible and its success has nothing to do with me. The success of this video is a testament to the power of the simple yet powerful message that is NO MORE. But, WKU says NO MORE has a story of which the beginning words were written well before I posted the video to my Facebook last week.

Since starting college, I have struggled to find a way to continue to raise awareness about these issues while balancing the demands of being a full time college student with two majors and a part-time job. Last fall, after weeks of frustration, I surrendered to reality and accepted the truth. “For everything there is a season.” I realized that my life was in a season of transition and that my education had to take precedence over my activism if I wanted to continue to make a significant impact in this work after I graduate. I decided that the most valuable, and ultimately the most helpful thing I could do for myself and for those I want so desperately to help, was to take a hiatus.

It was a good decision and as a result I was able to spend my time truly experiencing college and reinvesting in myself. I made some amazing friends, picked up a Spanish major (a most shocking turn of events), signed up to study abroad, started doing hot yoga, worked for the school paper, and made room in my life to begin to figure out who I was outside of the fundraising work I had been doing for so long—something I really needed to do.

During that time, I continued to stay informed about the issues. I kept track of what was going on at Joyful Heart and I stayed involved in different ways. I wrote articles about sexual violence awareness events on campus, I followed the whole VAWA reauthorization saga, I included the issues in my papers for class, I participated in my first “Take Back The Night” rally and I continued to think about how I could use what I was learning in school to expand and improve my future efforts.

Then, two weeks ago, I was assigned a video project in my Electronic Technologies in Journalism class and it clicked. I was going to make a video inspired by the NO MORE campaign. This video would speak to need for students and administrators to rebel against the deeply engrained practices of victim blaming that are notorious of universities and campus communities. My hope was to communicate that while campuses are often divided into a bunch of small groups—athletes, musicians, the photojournalists, the honors students, the Greek life community, the G.D.Is—there is power in our ability to unite beneath one movement and speak with our voices in unison about a tragic problem that we have all perpetuated in some form or another. With that in mind, I rallied my rebels and called upon friends, classmates and professors to help me make the video.

On Saturday night, after I had finished filming and editing the video, I posted it to Vimeo (as I was instructed to by my professor), tagged the video’s participants in a Facebook post of the link to the video and added a brief explanation so that others who saw it on my facebook would understand what it was. Then I went to sleep.

On Sunday when I woke and checked my Facebook the post had more than a dozen ‘likes’ and at least that many comments from people who had watched the video. People then began sharing it with their Facebook friends and when I realized what this video was doing and the way it was impacting people I knew I had to try and keep it going. I began to ask more people to share it on their pages. Then something amazing happened—their friends began sharing it on their own Facebook and Twitter pages and were emailing to others.

Today, the video has been shared so many times that I can no longer keep track of it. It’s on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and who knows where else. It has been shared by organizations in several states and today I learned a French professor at my school emailed it to his friends and family in France.

There are no words to describe the feeling that comes over me when I think about what people have done with this video. “Humbled” and “grateful,” are the only words that come close. I am humbled by the reach that others permitted this video to have. I am grateful to have witnessed the movement and to have watched as this video has started so many conversations about the NO MORE campaign and has inspired other people my age. To hear my friends and others I have never met say that this video has inspired them to speak about these issues in their own communities and schools is the greatest gift I have ever been given.

The hiatus is over, a new season has begun and thanks to all of you, I never stopped studying.

<3 Ella