The White House

Since its launch in September, the It’s On Us campaign has rapidly expanded to reach hundreds of thousands of students on college campuses across the country. It’s On Us is a cultural movement aimed at fundamentally shifting the way we think about sexual assault. In addition to a celebrity PSA with almost 4 million views, the campaign has generated more than 100,000 pledge signatures from people committing to be a part of the solution.

On Monday, It’s On Us launched its first Week of Action to engage thousands of students in the conversation about how to end campus sexual assault. Partner organizations and hundreds of school leaders joined together to hold over 200 events in 38 states across the country.

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

The week kicked off with the release of a new PSA encouraging bystander intervention. Snapchat sent a special PSA to more than 250,000 student users via the app, and offered special It’s On Us picture filters to help spread awareness. Xbox also featured the PSA on the game console’s dashboard, and SB Nation not only released two original PSAs with athlete spokespeople, but also created custom content for each of their individual partner sites.

Student leaders across hundreds of college campuses held events ranging from pledge drives at athletic events to panel discussions with college administrators and experts in the field. At the University of Texas at Dallas, the student government, sororities and fraternities, and other student stakeholders came together to launch their Week of Action. The It’s On Us logo and branding were incorporated into their homecoming festivities, and student leaders were featured in “We Are UT Dallas,” a one-minute video highlighting UT Dallas’s participation in the campaign.

On Monday, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hosted an “It’s On The Quad” pledge drive and photo booth. Throughout the week, they will distribute 500 It’s On Us t-shirts to students who take the pledge.

More than 50 colleges and universities have also created their own PSAs, including MIT, University of Arizona, Ohio State University, and even the staff and faculty at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Throughout the Week of Action, thousands of young people have stepped up and turned their pledge into action — and there will be more opportunities to engage with the It’s On Us campaign beyond this week. Over the coming months, we will work with our partners on college campuses and in communities to continue to engage students across the country.

It’s on us to realize we all have a role to play in preventing sexual assault, and we must challenge each other to do everything we can to make our college campuses safer.

Kyle Lierman
Office of Public Engagement
The White House