UNH Today

Among the first things to land on the desk of Rachel Stewart as they settled into a new role as director of UNH’s Sexual Harassment & Rape Prevention Program (SHARPP) in October 2022 was a formidably thick manilla folder simply labeled “Name Change.”

“In it was pages of feedback from previous staff teams who had begun the conversation about our name but never gotten anywhere with it,” Stewart says.

As of Aug. 9, that folder can officially get filed as complete. Following an in-depth program review and years of discussion around how to represent the program’s important history while arriving at a name that best serves the university community, SHARPP has officially rebranded as The SHARPP Center for Interpersonal Violence Awareness, Prevention, and Advocacy.

It was a confluence of three things that finally pushed the name change over the finish line after all those years, Stewart says. The first was a conversation with Nate Baker, executive director of creative at UNH marketing, that drove home the importance of finding a way to hold on to the brand equity SHARPP had built while considering a new name. Additionally, a research project with the University Archives brought the significance of the organization’s history to the fore, and a "Start with SHARPP" campaign designed to connect with key populations on campus and identify barriers, myths, and misconceptions that might be impacting their access to services or receiving the help they need identified some critical gaps.

“It was the triangulation of these few factors – the guidance from marketing, the additional history and context from the archives project and the Start with SHARPP campaign – that really made it impossible to ignore the fact that we had not only an opportunity, but an obligation to our mission, vision, and values to change our name if we wanted to be doing the best and most impactful work we could for our community,” Stewart says.

The project with the University Archives was spearheaded by student employee Sriyam Rimal and unearthed primary sources tracing the program’s name from "The Rape Task Force" in 1972" to the "Rape Assistance and Information Project" and ultimately to "Sexual Harassment and Rape Prevention Program" in 1982.

That coincided with a project in which the program was rewriting its mission, vision and values statements during the summer of 2023, prompting Erica Vazza, assistant director of engagement and prevention, to lead the development of the “Start with SHARPP” campaign to assess what roadblocks to access existed.

“Early on, our name had already begun to emerge as one source of those barriers and misconceptions, confirming what we anecdotally had already been hearing,” Stewart says.

All of that work led to the creation of three primary intentions on the road to arriving at The SHARPP Center for Interpersonal Violence Awareness, Prevention, and Advocacy: To update SHARPP’s name to better reflect the scope of services for experiences of all types of interpersonal violence, not just sexual harassment and rape; to maintain a connection to both the program’s roots and the SHARPP name; and create a name that would be more inclusive and less activating to individuals who have experienced harm.

“Using these intentions, we generated ideas first as a staff and then utilized a series of focus groups and surveys to gain feedback about options from our volunteers, as well as the broader UNH community of faculty, staff and students,” Stewart says. “A few things became clear, mostly that our volunteers were spending a tremendous amount of time explaining our name and our services – we do so much more than just ‘preventing sexual harassment and rape.’ Our community also valued clarity over options that were more descriptive and oblique.

“Ultimately, the qualitative as well as the quantitative feedback was clear that our current name needed to change and that "The SHARPP Center for Interpersonal Violence Awareness, Prevention, and Advocacy" was the best fit to accomplish everything we were looking for.”