UMatter initiative encourages action among students

The UMatter initiative, a University-wide health communication campaign aimed at enhancing bystander intervention, was launched at Campus Club on Friday.

The program aims to address three tenets of health and safety on campus: high-risk drinking, mental health distress and interpersonal violence and abuse, according to its website.

The four key themes of the campaign are ‘Action Matters,’ ‘Respect Matters,’ ‘Connecting Matters’ and ‘Limit Matters,’ UMatter student fellow Adam Cellon ’17 explained.

“We were looking for an umbrella framework that could encompass some key higher risk areas and cultivate specific programming for each,” executive director of University Health Services John Kolligian said.

The campaign is directly partnered with Counseling and Psychological Services, Health Promotion and Prevention Service and Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources & Education office.

UMatter Project Manager and Director of the SHARE Office Jacqueline Deitch-Stackhouse said the planning for the initiative began when she arrived at the University in 2011 and began to collaborate with Kathy Wagner, Health Educator at University Health Services, to conceive a new bystander intervention system.

Bystander intervention is a multi-step process that includes stages of identifying problematic situations, recognizing personal responsibility and taking action to intervene and therefore tasks individuals to prevent situations from escalating into dangerous behavior, Deitch-Stackhouse explained.

While other projects, such as the annual freshman orientation play that addresses sexual consent, were in place when she arrived, they sought to create a project that would pull these initiatives together to create a cohesive campus-wide campaign, she said.

“Not only is [UMatter] giving us, as UHS, a brand for all the different outreach and education, but it's also being honest about how connected everything is,” Cellon said, regarding UMatter's significance in making visible the connections between different health-related initiatives on campus.

One of the challenges was deciding whether to teach individuals just intervention skills or to teach individuals intervention skills in conjunction with the issues these skills could address, Deitch-Stackhouse added. Drawing upon inspiration from the UMatter initiative that originated at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh by Shelly Maxwell in 2012, they began to build a program with facets unique to the University’s needs.

“We set out on an almost two-year development path to create our own UMatter initiative,” Dietch-Stackhouse said.

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Dietch-Stackhouse explained that during the 2014-15 academic year undergraduate student leaders, faculty and staff, the student design agency as well as graduate students were targeted to form focus groups to inspire the initiative's construction. Stackhouse added that several surveys, including the “we speak” survey, were released last year to acquire baseline data to evaluate the efficacy of their UMatter goals.

“We wanted to ensure that we had a very comprehensive foundation of prevention programming,” she explained.

She noted that while the UMatter campaign is very focused on student outreach, its organizers are looking also to reach out to faculty and staff and to build entry points for them, saying that faculty and staff could also avail themselves of this information.

Deitch-Stackhouse said that the main medium for promulgating the message of the UMatter campaign is social media, adding that a number of UMatter student fellows have been working hard to put together the public information of the program. The student UFellows, she said, have mapped out the academic year and identified the times of year that are high-risk in terms of drinking or stress to prepare the release of messaging that will be meaningful for the community to receive at these high-risk times.

She also said that the UMatter initiative is looking to reward positive forms of bystander intervention, such as students’ escorting each other to McCosh Health Center. UMatter is in the process of developing tools such as competitions, giveaways and coupons to reinforce bystander behavior, Deitch-Stackhouse said.

“Our goal is to create that healthier, safer campus community where people do live by that credo,” Stackhouse said. “This is not a SHARE initiative. It is by the community for the community.”

Kolligian explained that the initiative has received a lot of input from students and enthusiasm across the board and said that although projects like these sometimes do not get enough initial traction, that was not the case with this project.

He noted that the project has received a lot of initial funding from the Vice President for Campus Life and the Provost’s Office.

Kolligian added that as with any initiative there is the worry that early excitement might lose its initial appeal, but that he is confident in the ability of the various offices to evaluate the efficacy of the program’s outreach.

“It’s not going to be a static program,” he said.

More than 60 students attended the UMatter launch party at Campus Club. A number of students were excited at the prospect of the initiative but felt that they had not been told enough about the initiative at the launch party.

“I’m really excited that they are starting this initiative, because as a senior I’ve seen a lot of campus stuff and over the years there have been some controversies,” Melody Falter ’16, who attended the launch party, said. “It might take some time to launch and for people to hear about it, but I think this was a great start.”