Mattering at Michigan

Like most colleges and universities, the University of Michigan came out of the pandemic reeling, awash with a host of new and heightened community mental health concerns. True to Michigan’s culture, its response was to go big. 

In 2021, Michigan made wellbeing across campus an institutional priority by becoming one of the first eight U.S. universities to adopt the Okanagan Charter, a framework and commitment to infuse health promotion into policies and systems at every level. To serve and steer these goals, the administration founded the Well-being Collective, a hub for wellness efforts with university-wide infrastructure and influence.

Today, the work of the Well-being Collective continues, as leadership finds fresh and innovative ways to deepen the impact. One of the latest developments is the Mattering at Michigan Initiative, a push to expand three existing wellness interventions that have the promise of being particularly effective at “mattering” — a concept that is frequently misunderstood but increasingly recognized as critical to emotional and behavioral health.   

Mattering may sound familiar, thanks in large part to the work of journalist Jennifer Wallace. Earlier this year, around the same time that Mattering at Michigan launched, Wallace released her second best-seller, “Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose.” In it, she contends that feeling like we matter is one of our most fundamental human needs. But it’s not just about belonging or being part of a group; to matter means knowing we’re valued and that we add value. 

The timing of Wallace and Michgan’s work wasn’t just coincidental. The original idea to package and amplify mattering at Michigan came from the author, who has been studying and promoting mattering work at colleges and universities as an extension of her research. She’s currently collaborating with Harvard and realized, rather serendipitously, that Michigan might offer another model for evidence-based best practices in this area that could be implemented at scale.  

While attending a Michigan Wolverines football game, Wallace had looked out across the packed stadium and discovered the cheering sections were color-coded. Students had followed emailed instructions, she learned, to wear either maize or blue depending on their seat assignment and now formed vibrant stripes around the arena. To Wallace, this was mattering at work — intentional community building that invited everyone to play a role.

 “All different types of kids felt a deep sense of belonging there, whether they were former jocks or members of the marching band or really cerebral academics. It felt like everyone had a place to belong at Michigan,” Wallace said. She started talking to parents and faculty about why they thought Michigan was different. “What is this secret sauce?” she would ask them.

Wallace’s hunch that Michigan was ripe for mattering was met with enthusiasm from campus leaders in mental health. Lindsey Mortensen, Michigan’s inaugural chief mental health officer, said the university’s size and sprawling organization are often barriers to implementing services or fostering a wider culture around wellbeing. Mattering excited her as a framework and ethos that could unite and guide wellbeing on a broad scale. 

Mortensen also recognized mattering as a promising antidote to the achievement culture rampant on Michigan’s campus. Students often get caught up in the rat race of academic and other success, she said, so gaining perspective on what really matters — namely, connecting with and supporting others — might help right the ship. “Mattering felt like a way to be responsive to a focus on values, but in a secular way,” she said.

With funding from an anonymous donor, the Mattering at Michigan Initiative involves a build-out of three individual programs: wellness check-ins for large classes, a for-credit course on navigating wellbeing in college, and a new “social prescribing” effort to promote engagement in nature, the arts, and the wider community. The three interventions are not only among the most popular; they are specifically designed to give students a sense that “they matter.”  

Big Classes

An important question for students at Michigan is how to experience mattering when they are one of so many. The large course wellness check-ins are meant to help there. With an easy-to-implement protocol, the effort is a way of touching base with students enrolled in some of the university’s largest lecture classes. It’s part of a growing trend in higher education focused on personalizing the educational experience in settings that typically make students feel anonymous.  

Like the larger Well-being Collaborative, the check-ins emerged following observations about student mental health during and after the pandemic. Faculty worried about their students, but busy fulfilling the traditional duties of teaching, wondered how they could best support hundreds of adrift young people.

Through a collaboration with the Wolverine Wellness, an implementating partner of the Well-being Collective, faculty can now work with a health promotion specialist, who will drop into classes mid-semester and present students with a digital form and the opportunity to seek help in three different ways: These include completing a brief survey on how they’re doing, signing up for a 20-minute check-in with a wellness coach, or requesting their professor to reach out to them. Wellness coaches will follow up with anyone who fills out the survey and indicates that their situation is “unmanageable.” They also share wellness resources with the class.

Part of the mattering is in the intention. As subtle as the nudge might be, even the quickest check-in can help students feel that their personal and academic success is valued. “We know that students who don't even opt in for the faculty check-in or the wellness check-in respond that they feel like their faculty respects them, cares for their wellbeing, is looking out for them,” said Janet Jansen, one of the specialists from Wolverine Wellness. “Just showing up and naming it,” she added, can make a difference.

Currently, the wellness check-ins cover around 11 large courses and reach around 2,000 students each semester. In a survey assessing whether the check-in helped students “feel supported in this class,” 83 percent of first-gen students and 72 percent of non-first-gen students agreed. 71 and 65 percent, respectively, also agreed the check-in helped them “learn about wellness resources on campus.”

A Small Class

The second program in the Mattering at Michigan Initiative impacts fewer students but in an in-depth, semester-long way. ALA 240: Living Well in College & Beyond is a course designed to familiarize students with the major, wellbeing-related public health issues likely to impact the college experience and skills key to navigating them. The class is academic, and it’s personal.  

When it launched, the course was a two-credit, elective opportunity capped at 15 students. It met once a week for two hours with a lead instructor and two peer facilitators. But alongside the Mattering Initiative, the class is growing. Soon it will be worth three credits, in addition to now fulfilling a social science distribution requirement. Enrollment has been raised to 54, looking toward 72, with participants gathering first for a lecture and then in small, peer-facilitated discussion sections.

The topics covered in ALA 240 span concerns from belonging and failure to substance use and sexual health. Through weekly readings, journaling, and conversation, students delve into these concepts both generally and in the context of their university. Discussions are especially important, encouraging the rich and varied perspectives of participants and peer facilitators from all four classes. Together students open up and break down shared challenges.

Timberlee Whiteus, a health promotion specialist, has been an instructor and involved in ALA 240 since 2023. She’s also a two-time Michigan graduate. To her, the class is really about general “campus culture” at Michigan, she said. Lately, she’s found the greatest or most pressing interest among students to revolve around social connectedness, or a lack thereof.

“It really is a shock sometimes to be in a room full of such bright people at such a great institution… to hear students saying that they really feel anxious to show up,” Whiteus said. “They feel like they're the only one experiencing these problems or having these challenges, or they're afraid that the person next to them is going to judge them.”

With students struggling in real time, the practical component of ALA 240 is as important as the theoretical. Major assignments are indeed experiential exercises in combatting the class’s central issues. The “Choose Your Own Adventure” series, for example, requires students practice four different skills, in whatever way they see fit: asking for help, being a buddy, perspective taking, and uncomfortable conversations. The final project asks them to go out into the community to bring the class content to at least 10 new people.  

Here, mattering is playing out on multiple fronts. The course’s existence, for one, signals to students that their school cares about them and their wellbeing. Participants also study mattering as a concept, contemplating how it functions at Michigan, and how to improve the culture around it. All along, they’re connecting with one another, working actively on their wellbeing, and helping others with theirs. 

Whiteus said students often tell her, “I don’t get this anywhere else. You all are really seeing me.” 

Beyond the Classroom

The newest of the Mattering at Michigan initiatives centers a fresh but increasingly popular practice in the wellbeing space: social prescribing. The basic idea is to connect people with opportunities to engage with others in the community. It’s a non-clinal approach to boosting mental and emotional health but with a clinical vibe that says this is serious. 

At Michigan, the effort is known as Experience Rx and involves wellness coaches or mental health counselors who refer students to a range of activities as if they were more traditional medical treatments. With the formal “prescription” of an authority and structure of an assignment, the thinking goes, young people may be more likely to actually get out there and seek the connection they need.

The origins of Experience Rx stem from Nature Rx, a student-led initiative launched at Michigan in 2019 to promote time in the outdoors for mental health relief. Nature Rx is still active, but now possible “prescriptions” also span experiences with the arts, service, exercise, and food. Some activities may be completed in a group; others could be done alone.

One of the critical elements of Experience Rx, and ideally social prescribing in general, is that the coaches and counselors do not assign experiences at random. The goal is to formulate a detailed profile of their students and then think intentionally about the type of engagement that would most benefit them. 

Lindsey Mortensen, who has been closely involved in the development of this project, explained the importance of getting this part right. She imagined the frustration a student could feel upon receiving a misaligned prescription: "You don't know me at all,” they might think. “I've just told you I hate being outside with insects and bugs, and you just told me to get out into nature and go walk in the arboretum.” 

Mortensen added that the prescription-transaction model is another way to boost mattering. She reflected back to when doctors handed over a physical prescription to a patient, explaining that kind of verbal and physical exchange is, in itself health-promoting. Although the Experience Rx organizers hope to eventually increase accessibility by creating a way for the students to “self-refer” online, the activities themselves are only one part of the larger initiative’s endeavor towards mattering.

“I think one of the connections to mattering and [Jennifer Wallace’s] work in general is this desire that we all have to be seen and understood,” Mortensen said. “That's where a really well-informed prescription or referral, that is really based on some attunement with the person in front of you, really matters.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.