A Health Promoting Campus: What is your role?

Session Topic

How Student Affairs and higher education leaders in all sectors of campus can use the Okanagan Charter as a powerful call to action to embed human and ecological considerations for health and wellbeing in our campus plans and policies, to create environments which support learning and personal development and culture of well-being. We know that people who are well are able to engage in deeper learning, are more productive, and have a stronger sense of community and connection — all of which help create happier, healthier campus communities. We recognize that to be well, we must maintain healthy and resilient ecosystems and that when people and place are considered together, our communities can truly thrive. Our institutions must confront the complex issues about health, wellbeing, and sustainability of people and the planet. The Okanagan Charter provides higher education with a common language, principles, and framework to put campuses at the forefront of this movement. For our learning communities who live, work learn, and play on our campuses, we must begin to plan health promotion actions into the fabric of our campus setting. This session will help leaders and administrators understand what it means to become a health promoting campus and how understanding the Okanagan Charter is an important step to creating a campus plan for wellbeing.

After the webinar what are the 4 things attendees will be able to do when they get back to their institutions?

1. Know why being a health promoting campus matters.
2. Understand the Okanagan Charter and why it is ground breaking.
3. Articulate how the campus physical environment plays a role in becoming a health promoting campus?
4. Advocate for a collective impact frameworks, campus master plans, and policies for creating well-being in settings, communities, and individuals.

Description

Why be a health promoting campus – With young adults in a new environment, our higher education settings can enhance their capacity of learning at the population-level, provide experience in a setting where health, wellbeing and sustainability are lived priorities while becoming a models for moving past individualistic bio-behavioral efforts to the creation of a community committed to wellbeing. We will cite research and report on practices in health promotion which demonstrated that the systematic approach is the most effective. An important element of this system is the setting, the more than human world, aka environment.

What is the Okanagan Charter – The Okanagan Charter is especially valuable to health promoting campuses because it is visionary, inspiring and very practical, with an action framework that can be adapted to any campus. This section will review the international effort around creating the charter, its components, and strategies for effective implementation.

Planning for Wellbeing – Establish why the quality and design physical environment or “setting” is critical element of being a health promoting campus.  How the planning process can help to embed health and wellbeing into all aspects of campus culture, across the administration, operations and academic mandates.

Examples and lessons learned – Through our practices and experiences the presenters will share how they have led health promotion action and collaboration using a Collective Impact Framework on their campus, within their locally communities and influenced our global community.