Enlarge By Bob Karp, Daily Record Alicia Whavers of Newark takes part in the "You Are Loved" chalk project at Drew University. MADISON, N.J.  Students at Drew University woke up Monday morning to gray skies overhead but rainbow-colored messages of hope on the ground. Joining students on more than 100 college campuses nationwide, they wrote and found simple messages of love and compassion in colored chalk on well-traveled paths, expressing sentiments such as "You are loved," "You are beautiful" and "Be yourself." "It lifted my spirits," says Kelly Bronner, 18, a freshman from Ridgewood, N.J., who was studying for a morning exam. "Whatever someone is going through, it tells you to hang in there, it's going to get better." For the second year, gay, lesbian and transgender campus support groups across the USA sought to raise awareness Monday about the high rate of attempted suicide in their community through the "You Are Loved Chalk Message" project. Organizers say the project attracted greater attention this year because of the five male youths who committed suicide in September, including two college students: Raymond Chase, an openly gay sophomore at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, and Tyler Clementi, a freshman at New Jersey's Rutgers University. RUTGERS: Suicide shows need for civility, privacy online "These tragedies are a wake-up call to society,' said Jen Dugan of Florham Park, N.J., who started the project as a junior at Drew in 2006. "Things are going to change because we are going to change them." Anti-gay bullying is suspected to have played a role in at least four of the September suicides of males, ages 13 to 19, says Laura McGinnis, spokeswoman of the Trevor Project, a national, 24-hour, toll-free, confidential suicide hotline for gay and questioning youth, which she says has received 187,000 calls since 1998. The other suicides took place in Texas, Indiana and California, she says. Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River nearly two weeks ago, three days after his roommate and another student used a webcam to broadcast on the Internet live images of Clementi having an intimate encounter with another man, prosecutors say. Last year, Dugan took the chalk project national, getting students at 50 college campuses involved, including the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Roanoke College in Salem, Va., and the University of Illinois-Chicago. This year, Dugan's project was supported by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and Active Minds, a college mental health awareness group, which helped spread the word further. • At Texas A&M University, the chalk project was combined with the NOH8 silent photo protest against California's Proposition 8. Participants were bused in from all over Texas, says Lowell Kane, coordinator of the campus GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender) resource center. • Students at the University of Maine chalked in the evening after a moment of silence, says Whitney Lee Kangas, graduate assistant for the campus counseling center. • Students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln participated for the second consecutive year, writing messages outside the student union, says senior Jason Lucht, 21, of Gretna, Neb., who considered suicide as a gay high school student. "When I was having problems, I tended to look down, so if I'd seen chalking on the ground, I would have seen that someone cared," Lucht says. Gay youth are two to six times more likely to report having attempted suicide than their peers, said Ann Haas, director of prevention projects for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. There is no data available on the sexual orientations of people who commit suicide, she says. "It's all too obvious in the past couple weeks how much negative reaction gay youth receive," Haas says. "To create visible messages using art and beauty to drive home positive messages can be a powerful input for young people." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more