JED Campus – A look into one of our Conference Presenters

For the next couple of months, we at CICMH will be highlighting organizations that will be hosting one of the many concurrent sessions available to attendees of our Whole Campus, Healthy Communities Conference in October. 

This month, we chatted with Erica Riba from The JED Foundation (JED) to learn more about JED’s comprehensive approach and what conference participants can look forward to learning at their concurrent session. 

The Jed Foundation (JED) is a nonprofit that exists to protect emotional health and prevent suicide for our nation’s teens and young adults. They partner with high schools and colleges and help them equip young people with the skills they need to help themselves and help one another. JED has many programs among them includes Set to Go which helps high school’s transition to college and adulthood.

Erica, LCSW is a Senior Campus Advisor who works with JED Campus, a program that works with 250 Colleges and Universities across the United States and Canada. JED Campus is designed to guide schools through a collaborative process of comprehensive systems, program and policy development with customized support to build upon existing student mental health, substance use and suicide prevention efforts.

They follow a comprehensive approach that can be found here.  

 

Erica tells us that there are two main things that are required in order to make a systemic change:

  1.  A campus wide approach. This requires collaboration between departments in the campus ecosystem.
  2. Top down support. This includes leadership, president, alumni, provost and donors, etc. 

What to expect at JED’s presentation at CICMH’s Whole Campus Healthy Communities Conference

JED Campus’ presentation titled “A Campus Wide Approach” will be an interactive session where participants will brainstorm what their campus looks like. As each campus is a unique ecosystem with a unique set of challenges, it is vital that participants are aware of what their campus needs. 

They will then look at their campus with real life examples and will begin to develop a campus wide approach. They will learn more about how to build a strategic team/task force and how to foster a community where everyone is involved. 

Participants will also approach questions such as:

Is our approach more than the counselling centre/health promotion?

Why do we need stakeholders?

What are our end goals?

Ideally, participants will leave inspired to propose changes on their campus or to tweak existing policies. 

“ A Campus Wide Approach” can be found on the Whoe Campus, Healthy Communties conference program as concurrent session G1 and will be taking place on October 16th at 2:45 pm. 

To register for our conference please click here.

To learn more about JED Campus please visit JED Campus at: https://www.jedcampus.org/

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