Olivia Wicki
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.
